Transcanada Letters by Roy Kiyooka was a landmark when it first appeared in 1975. Thirty years later, it remains one of the most remarkable literary texts in Canada. Transcanada Letters, which includes letters Kiyooka wrote from 1966 to 1975, offers a new generation of readers the opportunity to discover one of the most significant artistic and literary figures of Canada’s modern cultural history. Marvelously crafted, Transcanada Letters is at once personal meditation and cultural manifesto, travel diary and love missive, a testimonial of friendship and a dispatch from the creative front.

Roy Kiyooka (1926–1994) was a painter, poet, photographer, and arts teacher. A second generation Japanese Canadian, he was born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan in 1926, grew up in Calgary, Alberta, and died in Vancouver, B.C. in 1994. He was one of Canada’s first “multi-disciplinary” artists, and the subject of several important exhibitions during his lifetime. His visual artwork included paintings, sculpture, film, and photographs. During his career he taught at a number of universities, including the University of British Columbia. Kiyooka was named an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1978.

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Smaro Kamboureli is a Professor and the Avie Bennett Chair in Canadian Literature in the Department of English at the University of Toronto. The author of On the Edge of Genre: The Contemporary Canadian Long Poem and Scandalous Bodies: Diasporic Literatures in English Canada, which won the Gabrielle Roy Prize for Canadian criticism, she is also the editor of the anthology Making a Difference: Canadian Multicultural Literature and Lee Maracle’s Memory Serves: Oratories, and the co-editor of many volumes, including (with Robert Zacharias) Shifting the Ground of Canadian Literary Studies and (with Christl Verduyn) Critical Collaborations: Indigeneity, Diaspora, and Ecology.

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