As a teenager, legendary Canadian poet George Bowering lived the life of an ordinary boy. He loved baseball, read Westerns, held a part-time job, and fantasized about girls and women. George was due for a sexual awakening, which arrived when he was fifteen. But what took place was anything but ordinary when George found himself vying for the affections of three very different women: his first love, the girl from the wrong side of the tracks, and one of his high school teachers.

Set in the South Okanagan Valley in the Fifties, Pinboy is an intimately honest and often hilarious memoir that skilfully captures the delirious chaos that takes place as a boy becomes a man.

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

• Short-listed, Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize
• Short-listed, BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction

“There’s a great deal of gentle humour in this book, and no overt sentimentality. Nostalgia might not be what it used to be, but most of the time it’s pretty darned good.”

Vancouver Sun

“Bowering’s always had a knack for presentation in print … Pinboy reads easily, breezily, as a memoir or a novel, or Spalding Gray-like monologue.”

Winnipeg Review

“It’s the best kind of nostalgia – the kind that makes you think wistfully back on your own fifteen-year-old life. It would not work if the author were not still infused with some of that teenager’s verve and decency and wit. The boy is still very much a part of the man, and we’re all the better for it.”

BC Studies

“George’s adventures and misadventures make Pinboy the best candidate for a Stephen Leacock Award in a long, long time … [it] deserves a higher reward than that: many, many readers.”

The Globe and Mail

“I’ll hazard a prediction that Pinboy will be George Bowering’s most provocative work.”

Geist