Dorothy Livesay

Dorothy Livesay (born October 12, 1909 in Winnipeg , † December 29, 1996 in Victoria ) was a Canadian poet .

Life

The daughter of journalist, poet and translator Florence Randal Livesay and journalist JFB Livesay attended a private girls' school in Toronto and studied at the University of Toronto from 1927 to 1931 . During this time, her first volume of poetry, Green Pitcher, was published . 1931–32 she continued her studies at the Sorbonne .

In the wake of the global economic crisis, Livesay joined left student circles and became a member of the Communist Party after graduating . From 1936 she worked in Vancouver for their journal New Frontier . After her marriage in 1937 to Duncan Macnair , a theosophist, Livesay moved away from communist ideas. Their children were born in 1940 and 1942.

After Macnair's sudden death in 1959, Livesay worked for UNESCO in Paris and went to Zambia as a teacher until 1963. After returning to Canada, she resumed her studies and obtained a Masters degree from the University of British Columbia in 1964 . She then worked for ten years as writer in residence at various universities in Canada.

In addition to several honorary doctorates, Livesey received the Order of Canada in 1987 and the Order of British Columbia in 1992 . She spent the last years of her life on Galiano Island near Victoria.

The BC Book Prizes' BC Prize for Poetry, which has existed since 1986, was renamed the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize in her honor in 1989 .

Works

• Green Pitcher , 1928
• Day and Night , 1944
• Poems for People , 1947
• Call My People Home , 1950
• The Color of God's Face , 1964
• The Unquiet Bed , 1967
• A Winnipeg Childhood , 1973
• Ice Age , 1975
•  Right Hand, Left Hand: A True Life of the Thirties: Paris, Toronto, Montreal, The West, and Vancouver. Love, Politics, the Depression and Feminism. Press Porcepic, Erin ON 1977
  • Excerpt, translator Karin Simon: Two women, in: Women in Canada. Stories and poems. dtv, 1993
• The Raw Edges: Voices from Our Time . 1981
• The Phases of Love . 1983
• The Self-Completing Tree: Selected Poems . 1986
• Beginnings , 1988
• Journey With My Selves: A Memoir, 1909-1963 . Douglas & McIntyre, Toronto 1991
• Archive for Our Times: Previously Uncollected and Unpublished Poems of Dorothy Livesay . 1998

Archive inventory

• Victoria BC , dated 1975:  Dorothy Livesay Records . Holdings in the "British Columbia Archives"

literature

• Nadine McInnes: Dorothy Livesay's poetics of desire. Turnstone, Winnipeg 1994
• Helene Rosenthal, Rona Murray Eds .: Rooms of one's own. The Dorothy Livesay Issue, 5, 1-2, Vancouver 1979
• Peter Stevens: Dorothy Livesay. Patterns in a poetic life. Entertainment, Culture, Writing ECW Press, Toronto 1992
• Lee Briscoe Thompson: Dorothy Livesay. Twayne, Boston 1978
• WH New, Ed .: Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada. University of Toronto Press 1995-2000. Again 2002. pp. 670-673 (available in Google books )
• Nancy E. Butler:  Mother Russia and the Socialist Fatherland: Women and the Communist Party of Canada, 1932-1941, with specific reference to the activism of Dorothy Livesay and Jim Watts .  Diss. Phil. Queen's University  2010 full text

Web links

• Livesay , her subject: Spanish Civil War
• Dorothy Livesay’s  poem “Catalonia” by Ryan van den Berg
• Correspondence with Almuth Lütkenhaus , 1979 - 1993, Library and Archives Canada , item in the Findbuch 3685479

swell

• Dorothy Livesay ( English, French ) In: The Canadian Encyclopedia . Retrieved August 21, 2016.
• Unitarian Universalist Biographical Dictionary - Dorothy Livesay