Powerful, exquisite, and intricately crafted, this poetic memoir spans and reconfigures 30 years of an award-winning writer’s life. Ten years after beginning the project and more than 40 years after first recording information about the people, places, and events upon which the poems are based, this thoroughly unique project has taken on a life of its own, bent and reshaped by experience, time, and revision.

George Bowering, Canada’s first Poet Laureate, was born in the Okanagan Valley.After serving as an aerial photographer in the Royal Canadian Air Force, Bowering earned a BA in English and an MA in history at the University of British Columbia, where he became one of the co-founders of the avant-garde poetry magazine TISH. He has taught literature at the University of Calgary, the University of Western Ontario, and Simon Fraser University, and he continues to act as a Canadian literary ambassador at international conferences and readings.A distinguished novelist, poet, editor, professor, historian, and tireless supporter of fellow writers, Bowering has authored more than eighty books, including works of poetry, fiction, autobiography, biography, and youth fiction. His writing has been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, German, Chinese, and Romanian.Bowering has twice won the Governor General’s Award, Canada’s top literary prize. In 2019 he received the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement for an outstanding literary career in British Columbia.

George Bowering's profile page

“Easily Bowering's strongest book of poetry since Delayed Mercy and Other Poems . . . this is sincere and classic Bowering, illuminating new corners of phrase and personal / writing history, and expanding others, of home and life and love and ordinary events, beyond all the familiar and the unfamiliar tricks.” —The Globe and Mail

“His Life is a memoir that questions the genre itself, demonsrating the facile, trivial quality of mere biographical data when compared with the rich, complex, contradictory qualities of life.” —Quill & Quire