Vancouver and Its Writers

Ann Turner is Financial and Budget Manager at the University of British
Columbia Library.

Vancouver is the focus of this literary Gray Line tour in more ways than one. The guide is about Vancouver’s writers in the broadest sense, including not only the city’s native sons and daughters but also those who merely stayed with us awhile. Like Rudyard Kipling. It is about Vancouver itself, as depicted in the fiction of Vancouver writers, its landmarks and memorials, its neighbourhoods and ambience. The book is organized as a tour of one hundred Vancouver addresses that have some (occasionally tenuous) literary significance. One could actually follow the tour as outlined, starting at the Pauline Johnson monument in Stanley Park, proceeding around Point Gray, through South Vancouver to New Westminster, returning via the downtown area, and concluding on the mud flats of North Vancouver where Malcolm Lowry enjoyed the peaceful isolation of his squatter’s shack. On this geographical thread Twigg has hung an incredible quantity of biographical, historical, and literary information about over 100 writers and over 300 of their fictional works. Not all of the writers are as well known as Kipling, Pauline Johnson, Margaret Atwood, and William Deverell. Regrettably, many are not even known in their own city. In rescuing them from obscurity, this highly readable collection of facts, anecdotes, and criticism makes an important contribution to the study of Canadian literature. It is hoped that researchers’ interest will be piqued.