Sandra Djwa - Böcker

“Now, don’t you ever leave Newfoundland,” Premier Joey Smallwood told seventeen-year-old Sandra Djwa in 1956. But leave she did – only to return decades later as a pathbreaking literary scholar and one of Canada’s most influential female academics, carrying with her a remarkable legacy of intellectual nation-building.Part memoir and part literary history, Ground to Stand On traces a life in letters that was often ahead of its time. In a voice by turns quizzical, amused, and indignant, Djwa offers an immersive account of the struggles and achievements of the first generations of women professors in a male-dominated academy while charting the emergence of Canadian literature as a respected field of study. Along the way, she sketches incisive portraits of Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen, Michael Crummey, Northrop Frye, and Pierre Trudeau. Revisiting her acclaimed biographies of F.R. Scott, Roy Daniells, and P.K. Page, Djwa enriches them with fresh reflections on the art and challenges of literary biography.Scholarship on Canadian poetry and criticism does more than record: it shapes cultural belonging. Ground to Stand On is a meditation on selfhood, memory, and place, culminating in Djwa’s reckoning with ancestry and her Newfoundland sense of belonging.

Journey with No Maps is the first biography of P.K. Page, a brilliant twentieth-century poet and a fine artist. The product of over a decade's research and writing, the book follows Page as she becomes one of Canada's best-loved and most influential writers. "A borderline being," as she called herself, she recognized the new choices offered to women by modern life but followed only those related to her quest for self-discovery. Tracing Page's life through two wars, world travels, the rise of modernist and Canadian cultures, and later Sufi study, biographer Sandra Djwa details the people and events that inspired her work. Page's independent spirit propelled her from Canada to England, from work as a radio actress to a scriptwriter for the National Film Board, from an affair with poet F.R. Scott to an enduring marriage with diplomat Arthur Irwin. Page wrote her story in poems, fiction, diaries, librettos, and her visual art. Journey with No Maps reads like a novel, drawing on the poet's voice from interviews, diaries, letters, and writings as well as the voices of her contemporaries. With the vividness of a work of fiction and the thoroughness of scholarly dedication, Djwa illustrates the complexities of Page's private experience while also documenting her public emergence as an internationally known poet. It is both the captivating story of a remarkable woman and a major contribution to the study of Canada's literary and artistic history.