McWHIRTER, George
Vancouver, B.C.
Spanish-English
Biographical Data

Born 1939, George McWhirter left Ireland for Spain in 1965, then emigrated to Canada in 1966. His first book, Catalan Poems, shared the Commonwealth Poetry Prize with Chinua Achebe's Cry, Soul Brother, in 1972. He has published five books of poetry, three of short stories, two novels, and one book of translation. Cage (Oberon Press, 1987), a novel set in Mexico, won the 1987 Ethel Wilson Prize for Fiction, B.C. Book Awards; The Selected Poems of José Emilio Pacheco (New Directions) was awarded the 1987 F.R. Scott Prize for Translation by the League of Canadian Poets and the F.R. Scott Foundation. He has two children, Grania and Liam, and is married to Angela Mairead Coid. He is currently working in collaboration with Elva Macias, Sandro Cohen, José Emilio Pacheco, and Gabriel Zaid on an anthology of Mexican poetry covering poets born between 1939 and 1959, and a new novel set in Vancouver and Munich. His poetry appears in Penguin Book of Canadian Verse; Poets of Canada (Hurtig, ed. J.R. Colombo); Contemporary Poetry of British Columbia (Sono Nis, ed. J. Michael Yates); Soundings 72 (Blackstaff, ed. Seamus Heaney); Antología de la Poesia Actual Canadiense Inglesa (U.A. de San Louis Potosi, ed. Manuel Betanzos Santos); Aproximaciones (Ediciones Penelope, compiled by Miguel Angel Flores), etc.; short stories in Illusions 2 (Black Moss Press, ed. Geoff Hancock); Vancouver: Soul of a City (Douglas & McIntyre, ed. Gary Geddes); Stories of Pacific and Arctic Canada (Macmillan, ed. Rudy Wiebe & Andreas Schroeder); 72 Best Canadian Short Stories (Oberon Press, ed. David Helwig), etc. He has been associated with Prism International since 1968 as managing, then poetry, then co-, then advisory editor, and is currently advisor on translations. Professor and head of the Department of Creative Writing at U.B.C., he leads the poetry and literary-translation workshops there.