Patrick Lane (1939-2019), one of Canada’s most renowned writers, the most significant and gifted Canadian poets of the last half-century, spanned a distinguished literary career for 5 decades and published 27 volumes of poetry and other books of fiction and non-fiction, which won him numerous accolades, including the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, the Canadian Authors Association Award, the Dorothy Livesay Prize, British Columbia’s National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction and the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence. His poetry and fiction have been widely anthologized and have been translated into many languages. He was named an officer of the Order of Canada in 2014 in honor of his vast and accomplished body of work.

 

Lane had a struggling nomadic early life, making a living in logging camps, small towns and mines, suffered from the deaths of his brother and father and marriage failures. Despite a formal education only at high school, he turned out to be a distinguished self-taught poet through wide reading and dogged perseverance. Lane devoted the rest of his life into writing and teaching, held positions at several universities or as writer-in-residence, instructing generations of Canadian writers, leaving a profound impact on Canadian literary circle. His service to Canadian literature brought him honorary doctorates from several universities.

 

Lane’s poetry features distinctively as dealing with man’s rough treatment of his environment and of his fellow human beings in a straightforward way and with lush descriptive imagery. His wife Lorna Crozier, also a fellow award-winning poet once remarked: “He brought beauty into even those places that do not have beauty on their own, and into the lives of people who are struggling. He gave them a voice, and he gave them a place in letters. And I can’t think of many other poets who have done that.”