Gwendolyn margaret macewen biography

Canadian writer who published poetry, novels, short stories, radio plays, and children's fiction.

Gwendolyn Margaret MacEwen (1 September –

She published her first poem at the age of 17 in The Canadian Forum and left school a year later to become a writer, because, as she said, "I didn't want to spend a whole lot of time having to learn what literature was all about. I simply wanted to make it myself. She was also a frequent contributor to literary journals, and her work has been included in many anthologies.

She was briefly married to Acorn before the publication of her first two chapbooks of poetry in , Selah and The Drunken Clock. Her reputation as a poet was established with A Breakfast for Barbarians and further enhanced with The Shadow-maker , which won the Governor-General's Award for Poetry. In , MacEwen married Greek singer Nikos Tsingos and entered a phase in which her output was largely informed by mythology.

With Tsingos, she also translated two long poems by Greek writer Yannis Ritsos, which appeared in her Trojan Women in Twentieth-Century Poetry in English noted that "the voice she developed during this period is haunted by doubts about the border between dream and reality. During the s, MacEwen served as a writer in residence at the University of Western Ontario —85 and at the University of Toronto.

That decade also saw the publication of what critics regard as the most complete synthesis of her canon, The T. Lawrence Poems Told in the first person, this sequence of poems in three parts recreates Lawrence's experiences from boyhood to death. Calling this work an "extraordinary feat of empathy," George Woodcock noted in The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature that "the voice seems to be Lawrence's own.

In a statement included in Contemporary Poets , MacEwen noted, "I write to communicate joy, mystery, passion … not the joy that naively exists without knowledge of pain, but that joy which arises out of and conquers pain. I want to construct a myth. One critic called her poems "a balancing act between convictions and questions.