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 Canada Research Chair in Critical Studies in Canadian Literature at the University of Guelph. Her publications include Scandalous Bodies: Diasporic Literature in English Canada, which won the Gabrielle Roy Prize, and, with Roy Miki, Trans.Can.Lit: Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature (WLU Press, 2007). She is currently completing a new edition of her anthology Making a Difference: Canadian Multicultural Literature.

Robert Zacharias is a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. His research interests include migration literature, Canadian literature (with a focus on Mennonite literature), 18th-century studies, and critical pedagogy. His work has been published in Mosaic and Studies in Canadian Literature, as well as in the edited collections Embracing Otherness and Narratives of Citizenship.

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