Background

William Patrick Kinsella was born on May 25, 1935, in Edmonton, Canada. He was the son of John Matthew Kinsella and Olive Kinsella.

Education

Kinsella attended Parkdale School. He had been writing since he was a child and won a YMCA Challenge when he was 14. He received his Bachelor of Arts in creative writing at the University of Victoria in 1974 and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in English at the University of Iowa in 1978.

Kinsella was presented with honorary degrees from Laurentian University, the University of Victoria, and the Open Learning Institute.

Career

William Patrick Kinsella worked at various odd jobs, such as running his own pizza restaurant, Caesar's Italian Village, managing a credit agency, and driving a taxicab. After his graduation, he taught in the English Department at the University of Calgary from 1978 to 1983. Kinsella was a prolific writer from 1977 until 1997 when he suffered a head injury after being struck by a car.

In his stories and novels, Kinsella created 2 disparate fictional universes. The first, set largely on the Hobbema Reserve in central Alberta, focuses sympathetically on the lives of Indigenous people in their perennial skirmishes with blundering white institutions and bureaucracies. Dance Me Outside (1977) was the first of Kinsella's several story collections set in Hobbema and narrated by Silas Ermineskin. It was made into a film of the same name in 1994, directed by Bruce McDonald, and was the basis for the CBC television series The Rez. Later titles in Kinsella's Hobbema series include The Fencepost Chronicles, Brother Frank's Gospel Hour (1994), and The Secret of the Northern Lights (1998).

In 1980 Kinsella published Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa, a collection of short pieces set in Iowa, urban Canada, and San Francisco. The title story also was selected to appear in an anthology titled Aurora: New Canadian Writing 1978. An editor at Houghton Mifflin saw Kinsella's story in Aurora and urged him to expand it into a novel. Kinsella set to work expanding Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa, but he decided instead to leave the story intact as the first chapter and build on the plot with a variety of other material. The book was adapted for film as Field of Dreams (1989), which popularized the phrase, "If you build it, he will come."

Among his other baseball works are The Iowa Baseball Confederacy (1985), Magic Time (1998), and Japanese Baseball and Other Stories (2000). Kinsella edited Diamonds Forever: Reflections from the Field, the Dugout & the Bleachers (1997) and co-wrote the Japanese non-fiction book Ichiro Dreams: Ichiro Suzuki and the Seattle Mariners (2002).

Although his 1997 accident had a devastating impact on his creative output, Kinsella continued to write non-fiction and to contribute to Canadian literature. From 2001 to 2006 he served as the preliminary judge of the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Contest.

Achievements

• William Patrick Kinsella was a legendary fiction writer. His writing has had a significant impact on the North American literary landscape. His talent and dedication to his writing allowed him to remain one of the most successful and prolific writers in Canada. In the past 25 years, he published more than 30 novels and collections of short stories, hundreds of articles and reviews, poems, stage, and screenplays.
  
  His book Shoeless Joe won the Canadian Authors Association Prize, the Alberta Achievement Award, the Vancouver Award, and the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship. Kinsella won the Leacock Award in 1987 and in 1993 was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. In 2005, he was awarded the Order of British Columbia, and in 2009, he was awarded the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Winter Helen Dropped By

    (Narrated by young Jamie O'Day, who is beginning to unders...)

    1994
  • Magic Time

    (Mike Houle is a college all-star second baseman in his ju...)

    1996
  • Butterfly Winter: A Novel

    (Butterfly Winter was the seventh novel published by the l...)

    2011
  • The Iowa Baseball Confederacy: A Novel

    (The Iowa Baseball Confederacy is a 1986 novel written by ...)

    1986
  • Shoeless Joe

    (Shoeless Joe is a 1982 magic realist novel by Canadian au...)

    1980
  • Box Socials: A Novel 1991
  • If Wishes Were Horses 1996

Religion

Kinsella was an atheist.

Membership

William was a member of the National Scrabble Association and American Atheists.

• 

  American Atheists , United States

Interests

• Artists

  Allen Sapp

• Sport & Clubs

  baseball

Connections

William was married twice. On September 10, 1965, he married Mildred Irene Clay but they divorced in 1978. Three children: Shannon, Lyndsey, Erin were born from this marriage. Kinsella married the second time Ann Ilene Knight on December 30, 1978. The marriage ended in 1997.

Father:

John Matthew Kinsella

Mother:

Olive Kinsella

ex-wife:

Mildred Irene Clay

ex-wife:

Ann Ilene Knight

Daughter:

Shannon Kinsella

Daughter:

Lyndsey Kinsella

Daughter:

Erin Kinsella

References

• Going the Distance: The Life and Works of W.P. Kinsella
  2019