David Helwig
Personal Information
Description
David Helwig, CM, a Canadian editor, essayist, memoirist, novelist, poet, short story writer and translator, was born and spent his early childhood years in Toronto, Ontario. When he was ten years old, his family moved to Niagara-on-the-Lake, where his father ran an antiques business. He received a Bachelor's degree from the University of Toronto in 1960 and two years later, a Masters degree from the University of Liverpool. After graduating, he returned to Canada to teach at Queen's University in Kingston. His first book, a collection of poems called Figures in a Landscape, was published in 1968 with Oberon Press. In 1992 he moved to Montreal, then after four years there, to Belfast, Prince Edward Island. In 2007, he received the Matt Cohen Award from the Writers' Trust of Canada in honour of his lifetime contribution to Canadian literature. He was appointed Prince Edward Island's third Poet Laureate in 2008 and on July 1, 2009 was named a Member of the Order of Canada. Helwig published nearly fifty books of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction over the course of his five-decade career. He died on October 16, 2018, at the age of 80 in Montague, Prince Edward Island.
Books
Saltsea
A lovely, meditative novel, a story about memory, and about how what once was continues to affect what is and what will be. It is the story of a place, of the family that used to own it, and the people who have been its caretakers. Saltsea, a hotel on the shores of Prince Edward Island, where people come for a brief time, their lives intersecting in intimate and unforeseen ways. The characters of Saltsea are finely drawn, with humour, love and compassion. Sadness and even tragedy are a constant here, but Helwig handles it all humanely, without sentimentality, and with the control of a writer at the height of his powers. Saltsea, befitting a novel so concerned with memory, is not something you will soon forget.
Back then
"Novelist Anne Bernays, born in 1930, and biographer Justin Kaplan, born in 1925, both natives of New York, came of age in the 1950s, when the pent-up energies of the Depression years and World War II were at flood tide. Back Then, written in two separate voices, is the candid, anecdotal account of two children of privilege, one from New York's East Side, the other from the West Side, pursuing careers in publishing and eventually leaving to write their own books. They both sought self-knowledge and realization through years of psychoanalysis. They brushed shoulders with celebrities like William Faulkner, Somerset Maugham, Marlene Dietrich, and Anatole Broyard.". "Before Bernays and Kaplan met and married, each had enjoyed the sexual and social freedom that, along with the dark shadow of McCarthyism and the Cold War, was among the distinguishing marks of the 1950s. In many other respects, the story they tell could almost as well be about an earlier era."--BOOK JACKET.