Warder was born in England on 8 September 1924. He studied
Sanskrit and
Pali at the
School of Oriental and African Studies, and received his doctorate from there in 1954. His thesis, supervised by John Brough, was entitled
Pali Metre: A Study of the Evolution of Early Middle Indian Metre Based on the Verse Preserved in the Pali Canon. (When it was published in 1967, the title was changed to
Pali Metre: A Contribution to the History of Indian Literature.) For a number of years, he was an active member of the
Pali Text Society, which published his first book,
Introduction to Pali, in 1963. He based this popular primer on extracts from the
Dīgha Nikāya, and took the then revolutionary step of treating Pali as an independent language, not just a derivative of Sanskrit. His began his academic career at the
University of Edinburgh in 1955, but in 1963 moved to the
University of Toronto. There, as Chairman of the Department of East Asian Studies, he built up a strong programme in Sanskrit and South Asian studies. He retired in 1990.
Studies on Buddhism in Honour of Professor A. K. Warder was published in 1993, edited by Narendra K. Wagle and Fumimaro Watanabe. He and his wife, Nargez, died of natural causes almost simultaneously on 8 January 2013. He was eighty-eight, and she was ninety. They had no children. They were buried together following a Buddhist service. ==Notable works==