|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Born in 1938, Jack Hodgins grew up, as his parents did, in the small town of Merville which is located in the Comox Valley of Vancouver Island. He started writing as a young boy and left home in 1957 to study English literature at the University of British Columbia. There, he took a course in creative writing taught by Earle Birney, an experience which validated his dreams of becoming a published writer. Marrying in 1960 and graduating from UBC with a Bachelor of Education, Hodgins returned with his wife to Vancouver Island where he took a position teaching High School English in Nanaimo, a job he held until 1979. Despite a busy teaching career and family life with his wife and three children, Hodgins still managed to find time to write and submit his works for publication. It was not until 1968, however, that one of his submissions did not elicit a rejection slip. After that first appearance in print, his stories were accepted by a number of publications, including Descant, The Capilano Review, and Canadian Forum. This series of successes culminated in 1976 with the publication of his first volume of short stories, Spit Delaney's Island. His first novel, The Invention of the World, was published just a year later to critical and commercial success and led him to accept a one year writer-in-residence position at Simon Fraser University.
The publication of The Resurrection of Joseph Bourne in 1979 marked a turning point in Jack Hodgins' career and confirmed him as one of the most important new Canadian writers of the 1970s. First, he took a one-year leave from his job as a teacher and moved his family to Ottawa, where he had accepted a writer-in-residence position at the University of Ottawa. Then, The Resurrection of Joseph Bourne won the 1979 Governor General's Literary Award for English Language Fiction. This success, combined with his experience in Ottawa, led Hodgins to choose to devote himself to writing full-time. In 1980, Hodgins and his family moved back to B.C., where he resigned from his teaching position in Nanaimo and put the finishing touches on The Barclay Family Theatre, a new collection of short stories that returned to the characters of the Barclay sisters whom he had introduced in Spit Delaney's Island. In 1981, the family moved back to Ottawa, where Jack took on a position as a creative writing instructor and writer-in-residence. Hodgins' next publication was the 1983 collection of excerpts from unpublished and unfinished works entitled Beginnings: samplings from a long apprenticeship: novels which were imagined, written, re-written, submitted. Later that year, he accepted a full-time position as a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Victoria, a decision which allowed him and his family to return to Vancouver Island.
Since his return to the West coast, Hodgins' writing has moved in a few new directions: he has written a successful guide to writing fiction entitled A Passion for Narrative (1994), a children's book entitled Left Behind in Squabble Bay (1988), and Over Forty in Broken Hill (1992), a book about his own travels in Australia. He also published three novels during that time: The Honourary Patron (1987), Innocent Cities (1990), and The Macken Charm (1995), the latter of which marks a return to the themes and characters of his earlier and still most popular works. Jack Hodgins' upcoming novel, Broken Ground (1998), is being heralded by those who have read advance copies as one of the most important novels of the Fall season and as containing the most powerful descriptions of the First World War since Timothy Findley's The Wars. Broken Ground is set in 1922 on a Vancouver Island soldiers' settlement and details the lives of the people there and of the soldiers who are unable to escape the haunting memories of their experiences overseas.
| Macken Charm, The - Emblem Edition |
$ 16.99 | BUY |
|---|---|---|
| Spit Delaney's Island |
$ 6.95 | BUY |
|
Northwest Passages 628 Penzer Street Kamloops, BC, V2C 3G5 CANADA |
 |
telephone: 250-372-1972 toll free: 1-877-7CANLIT fax: 250-374-0915 e-mail: info@nwpassages.com |
©1996-1999 Northwest Passages.Site created by MediaWeb Solutions & Northwest Passages using The B.O.S.S. |
|