George McWhirter


George McWhirter is an Irish-Canadian writer, translator, editor, teacher and Vancouver's first Poet Laureate.
The son of a shipyard worker, George McWhirter was raised in a large extended family on the Shankill Road in Belfast. He and his extended family spent the war years and then weekends and the summers at their seaside bungalow in Carnalea, now a suburb of Bangor, County Down. In 1957 he began a "combined scholarship" studying English and Spanish at Queen's University, Belfast, and education at Stranmillis College, Belfast. His tutor at Queen's was the poet Laurence Lerner, and he was a classmate with the future literary critic Robert Dunbar and the poets Seamus Heaney and Seamus Deane. After graduating, McWhirter taught in Kilkeel and Bangor, County Down, Northern Ireland, and in Barcelona, Spain, before moving to Port Alberni, B.C. Canada. After receiving his M.A. from the University of British Columbia, where he studied under Michael Bullock and J. Michael Yates, he stayed on to become a full professor in 1982 and head of the Creative Writing Department from 1983 to 1993. He retired as a Professor Emeritus in 2005. He was associated with PRISM international magazine from 1968 to 2005. McWhirter is the author and editor of numerous books and the recipient of many awards. His first book of poetry, Catalan Poems, was a joint winner of the first Commonwealth Poetry Prize with Chinua Achebe's Beware, Soul Brother. He was made a life member of the League of Canadian Poets in 2005 and is also a member of the Writers' Union of Canada and PEN International.
In March 2007, he was named Vancouver's inaugural Poet Laureate for a two-year term. He currently writes full-time and lives in Vancouver with his wife. They have two children and three granddaughters.

Poetry

  • Catalan Poems
  • Queen of the Sea
  • Twenty-Five
  • The Island Man
  • Fire before Dark
  • A Staircase for All Souls
  • Incubus: The Dark Side of the Light
  • The Book of Contradictions
  • The Incorrection
  • ''The Anachronicles''

Fiction

  • Bodyworks
  • God's Eye
  • Coming to Grips with Lucy
  • A Bad Day to Be Winning
  • Paula Lake
  • Cage
  • The Listeners
  • Musical Dogs
  • ''A Gift of Women''

Anthologies edited

  • Contemporary Poetry of British Columbia
  • Words From Inside: Prison Arts Foundation
  • Where Words Like Monarchs Fly: A Cross-generational Anthology of Mexican Poets in Translation
  • ''A Verse Map of Vancouver''

Selected poems edited and translations

In Anthology

  • New Generation Poetry
  • Soundings '72
  • The Wearing of the Black An Anthology of Contemporary Ulster Poetry
  • The Penguin Book of Canadian Verse
  • New: West Coast: 72 Contemporary BC Poets
  • The Poets of Canada
  • Ilusion Two: fables, fantasies and metafictions
  • Shoes and Shit: STORIES FOR PEDESTRIANS
  • Aproximaciones Translated by Jose Emilio Pacheco
  • Vancouver Soul of a City
  • Moving Off the Map: from "story" to "fiction"
  • The Blackstaff book of Short Stories
  • Compañeros: An Anthology of Writings about Latin America
  • The Second Book of Blackstaff Short Stories
  • Best Canadian Stories
  • Witness to Wilderness: The Clayoquot Sound Anthology
  • Thru the Smoky End Boards: Canadian Poetry About Sports & Games
  • Irish Writing in the Twentieth Century
  • When I Was a Child:Stories for Grown-ups and Children
  • THE BLACKBIRD'S NEST An Anthology of Poetry from Queen's University Belfast
  • In Fine Form The Canadian Book of Form Poetry
  • LONG JOURNEY Contemporary Northwest Poets
  • JAILBREAKS: 99 Canadian Sonnets
  • ROCKSALT: An Anthology of Contemporary BC Poetry
  • How the Light Gets in... Anthology of Poetry from Canada
  • The Stony Thursday Book: A Collection of Contemporary Poetry
  • Making Waves: Reading BC and Pacific Northwest Literature
  • CVC Carter V. Cooper Short Fiction Anthology Series Book Three
  • Naked in Academe: Celebrating Fifty Years of Creative Writing at UBC
  • Pulp Literature Issue 9, Winter 2016
  • CLI FI:Canadian Tales of Climate Change
  • Legions of the Sun: Poems of the Great War edited with an introduction by Joseph Hutchinson
  • Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology
  • '' Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology 2024 ''

Plays

  • 1981 "Don't Go Walking on the Water", Vancouver: CBC Radio Network
  • 1981 "The Listeners", Vancouver: CBC Radio Network
  • 2009 "Hecuba" by Euripides, produced by Blackbird Theatre at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre
  • 2016 "The House of Bernarda Alba" by Federico Garcia Lorca, workshop and reading at the Carnegie Centre, organized by Luisa Jojic and directed by Rachel Peake.

Awards and honours