Celebrating B.C. Culture

Literary Arts

Explore B.C. Writing

British Columbia's thriving literary community is showcased in BC Scene (www.bcscene.ca/en/media/details.asp?newsID=46). Here are three well-known Canadian writers from B.C. whose archives are a featured part of the Library and Archives Canada (LAC) collection.

George Bowering

One of Canada's most prolific and versatile writers, George Bowering has written over 60 works of fiction, poetry, history, biography and criticism. Wry humour and playfulness suffuse much of Bowering's writing. A number of his works centre on baseball-a lifelong passion-including Baseball Love, a work of travel writing published in 2006.

Born in Penticton, B.C., Bowering has spent most of his life and career in Vancouver. In 2002, he was named Canada's first Parliamentary Poet Laureate, a post he tackled with energy and enthusiasm as he encouraged Canadians to read poetry. George Bowering was named an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2002, and awarded the Order of British Columbia in 2004.

LAC is proud to house the archives of George Bowering. This large collection attests to this multi-talented writer and literary personality.

Recent works:

Vermeer's Light: Poems, 1996-2006 (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2006).

Baseball Love (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2006).

Left Hook: A Sideways Look at Canadian Writing (Vancouver: Raincoast Books, 2005).

Rewriting My Grandfather (Vancouver: Nomados, 2005).

P.K. Page

One of Canada's leading poets, P.K. Page published her first collection of poetry, As Ten As Twenty, in 1946. Page's other poetry collections include The Metal and the Flower (1954), Cry Ararat! (1967), Evening Dance of the Grey Flies (1981), The Glass Air (1985), Hologram: A Book of Glosas (1994) and Planet Earth (2002). Her works also include fiction and children's literature.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, Page lived outside of Canada, accompanying her husband, Arthur Irwin, on diplomatic postings to Australia, Brazil and Mexico. They returned to Canada in 1964 and settled in Victoria. Excerpts from her travel diaries were published in 1987 under the title Brazilian Journal.

P.K. Page is also a well-known artist painting under the name P.K. Irwin. Her work is found in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Canada and numerous private collections.

Page has won many awards, including the Oscar Blumenthal Prize for poetry (Chicago, 1944), the Governor General's Award for Poetry (1954), the Canadian Authors' Association Literary Award for Poetry (1986), a B.C. Book Awards Hubert Evans Prize (1988) and the Banff School of Fine Arts National Award (1989). She was short-listed for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2003. Page was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a member of the Order of British Columbia and a Companion to the Order of Canada. A film about Page, Still Waters: The Poetry of P.K. Page, was produced in 1991 by the National Film Board.

Recent works:

You Are Here (Sydney, B.C.: Hedgerow Press, 2008).

The Essential P.K. Page, selected by Arlene Lampert and Théa Gray (Erin, Ontario: Porcupine's Quill, 2008).

The Filled Pen: Selected Non-Fiction, edited by Zailig Pollock (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007).

Hand Luggage: A Memoir in Verse (Erin, Ontario: Porcupine's Quill, 2006).

A Brazilian Alphabet for the Younger Reader (Erin, Ontario: Porcupine's Quill, 2005).

Visit P.K. Page's website at www.pkpage.ca/.

Daphne Marlatt

Daphne Marlatt is a poet, novelist, theorist, teacher and editor. Her work blurs the distinctions between poetry, documentary, fiction and autobiography.

In 1974, Marlatt paired her verse with Robert Minden's photographs to create her well-known work Steveston, about the residents of a Japanese-Canadian fishing community in the Fraser River Delta. It was republished in 2001 with new poems and photographs. Her oral history project Steveston Recollected: A Japanese-Canadian History was produced by CBC radio in 1975.

Daphne Marlatt's work was increasingly concerned with feminism and language theory from the 1980s onward. Her works Touch to My Tongue (1984) and Taken (1996) explore lesbian relationships, and her novel Ana Historic (1988) presents a modern woman encountering the lack of archival evidence of women's lives.

Marlatt was a main organizer of two conferences: West Coast Women and Words (1983) and Telling It: Women and Language Across Cultures (1989). She was also a member of the editorial collective of Tessera, a journal of theoretical and experimental writing of Quebecois and English-Canadian feminists.

In 2006, Marlatt's The Gull, a noh play or Japanese musical drama, was produced by Pangaea Arts. It depicts the story of Japanese-Canadian fishermen at Steveston, B.C. Daphne Marlatt lives in Victoria.

Recent works:

The Given (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2008).

Seven Glass Bowls (Vancouver: Nomados, 2003).

This Tremor Love Is (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2001).

Link to details of the Pangaea production of The Gull at www.pangaea-arts.com/history/.