Elizabeth W. Brewster

Description

Elizabeth Winifred Brewster, CM, SOM, a Canadian poet, author, and academic, was born in Chipman, New Brunswick, the youngest of five children in a family of limited means. Despite ill health and a sporadic early education, she was a keen reader and her first poem, submitted by her father and accepted by the Saint John Telegraph-Journal, was published when she was just twelve years old. In 1942, Brewster entered the University of New Brunswick on a small scholarship, where she helped found the longstanding Canadian literary journal The Fiddlehead. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1946, a M.A. from Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1947, and began her Ph.D. at Indiana University before electing to travel to England on a Beaverbrook overseas scholarship to study at King's College, London from 1949-50. Later she received a Bachelor of Library Science from the University of Toronto, and returned in 1957 to Indiana University Bloomington to complete her Ph.D. (1962). She was a professor at the University of Saskatchewan, where she taught literature and creative writing from 1972 until she retired in 1990. One of only a few modernist women poets of the 1940s and 50s, Brewster published over the course of her long career twenty-two collections of poetry, beginning with East Coast (Ryerson Press, 1951), as well as five books of fiction and two memoirs. She also received many honours, including the E.J. Pratt Award, a Saskatchewan Lifetime Achievement Award, an honorary doctorate from the University of New Brunswick, the Saskatchewan Book Award, a Saskatchewan Order of Merit, and the Queen's Diamond Jubilee medal. Her poetry collection Footnotes to the Book of Job was shortlisted for the 1996 Governor General's Award and, in 2001, she was inducted into the Order of Canada, Canada's highest civilian honour. Elizabeth Brewster died in 2012 at the age of ninety. (This information was gathered from several sources.)