Patrick Lane

Patrick Lane, whose career spanned more than 50 years, was one of Canada's preeminent 20th-century poets. He won numerous awards, including the Governor General's Award for Poetry, the Canadian Authors Association Award, the Lieutenant Governor's Award for Literary Excellence, three National Magazine Awards, the British Columbia National Award for nonfiction, and the Order of Canada. He wrote 25 volumes of poetry, including The Collected Poetry of Patrick Lane (Harbour Publishing, 2011), the memoir There Is a Season (McClelland & Stewart, 2004), and two novels, Red Dog, Red Dog (McClelland & Stewart, 2008) and Deep River Night (McClelland & Stewart, 2018).

Born in Nelson, British Columbia, Lane attended high school in Vernon and had no further formal education. During his 20s, Lane held a series of difficult jobs in the logging industry in the northern part of Canada—as a chokerman, a truck driver, an industrial first aid man, a sawmill worker, a sales representative, and a timekeeper, all of which he wrote about in his poems and prose. In 1965, he moved to Vancouver and began to connect with other poets of his generation.

Lane lived and traveled extensively around the world, and his work has been published in a number of countries, including England, France, the Czech Republic, Italy, China, Japan, Chile, Colombia, Yugoslavia, the Netherlands, and Russia. He was a writer in residence and a teacher at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec; the University of Victoria in British Columbia; and the University of Toronto in Ontario. Lane taught creative writing and Canadian literature courses at the University of Saskatchewan and at the University of Victoria in Victoria, British Columbia. When he retired from formal teaching, he led retreats and workshops for writers. His final book of poems, The Quiet in Me, was published posthumously in 2022 by Harbour Publishing.