Margaret avison biography
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Margaret Avison
Margaret Avison was born in 1918 in Galt, Ontario, Canada, and was raised in Regina, Calgary, and Toronto. She began writing at an early age and studied English literature at the University of Toronto’s Victoria College, earning a BA in 1940 and an MA in 1965. In the early 1940s, her poems began to appear in periodicals and anthologies. In 1956, she received a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship in poetry, and in 1960, she published her debut collection, Winter Sun (Routledge and Kegan Paul), which was awarded Canada’s Governor General’s Award for poetry.
In 1966, Avison’s second collection, The Dumbfounding, was published in the United States by W. W. Norton. Subsequent books include Sunblue (Lancelot Press, 1978), Not Yet But Still (Lancelot Press, 1997), and No Time (Brick Books, 1989), for which she received a second Governor General’s Award in 1990. Her collection Concrete and Wild Carrot (Brick Books, 2002) was awarded the 2003 Griffin Poetry Priz
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Margaret Avison
Margaret Avison was born in 1918 in Galt, Ontario, raised in Regina, Calgary and Toronto, where she completed high school in 1936. She continued her studies at University of Toronto earning a B.A. in 1940 and an M.A. in 1963. Her work has been recognized with two Governor General’s Awards for Poetry (Winter and Sun and No Time), by three honorary doctorates and by an officership in the Order of Canada. One of the poems in Concrete and Wild Carrot (‘Prospecting,’ retitled from ‘An-astronomy’) was awarded first place in the category of the Canadian Church Press Awards for 2000. Her other publications include The Dumbfounding, sunblue, Selected Poems, A Kind of Perseverance (prose) and Not Yet but Still. She was most recently honoured with the the Leslie K. Tarr Award for outstanding contribution to Christian writing and publishing in Canada.
The Porcupine’s Quill published a collection of Ma
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Margaret Avison (1918- ), poet, was born in Galt, Ont. and educated at the Victoria College, University of Toronto (B.A., 1940). Before attending schools of creative writing at the Universities of Indiana (1955) and Chicago (1956-7), Avison worked as a librarian, educator, and social worker in Toronto. From 1964 to 1966, she returned to do graduate work in English at the University of Toronto, and in 1973-4, she was writer-in-residence at the University of Western Ontario. Her first published poem, "Gatineau," appeared in Canadian Poetry Magazine in 1939, and several others were published during the war years in Canadian Forum. Avison's first major appearance was in the 1943 edition of A.J.M. Smith's anthology, The Book of Canadian Poetry. During the ten years after the war, she wrote poems and book reviews for Canadian Forum, Poetry, Contemporary Verse, Origin, and produced a History of Ontario (1951) for use at the junior high school level. Since living as a Guggenheim fellow in C