Sandra Djwa – författare

“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.

Carl Klinck''s autobiography is combined with a history of the development of Canadian literature as a

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.

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.

This volume of E.J. Pratt's selected poems introduces Pratt's poems to the college and university student, to provide the kind of information needed for an informed reading of the poems. The volume offers a full sampling of Pratt's poems chosen on the joint basis of representativeness and intrinsic value. This includes the major long poems, The Witches' Brew, The Iron Door, The Titanic, Brébeuf and His Brethren, Towards the Last Spike, and important shorter lyrics including 'Newfoundland,' 'Come Away, Death,' and 'From Stone to Steel.'The editorial approach has been historical, chronological and biographical. The introduction locates Pratt in his Newfoundland and Canadian contexts and discusses the development of his work in terms of his early modernist contemporaries, concluding that E.J. Pratt remains the most important and influential Canadian poet up to the mid-fifties. As such, he has been an key figure in shaping the Canadian literary imagination of his day and the later poetics of landscape adopted by Earle Birney and Margaret Atwood.The reader is provided with annotations, textual notes, a biographical chronology, and an introduction which locates Pratt in his Newfoundland and Canadian contexts and discusses the development of his work in terms of his modernist contemporaries. The printed volumes is supplemented by the electronic resources of the Selected Pratt website at http://www.trentu.ca/pratt/selected.

This volume of E.J. Pratt's selected poems introduces Pratt's poems to the college and university student, providing the background necessary for an informed reading of the poems. The volume offers a full sampling of Pratt's poems chosen both for their representativeness and for their intrinsic value. Included are the major long poems, The Witches' Brew, The Iron Door, The Titanic, Brébeuf and His Brethren, and Towards the Last Spike, and important shorter lyrics such as 'Newfoundland,' 'Come Away, Death,' and 'From Stone to Steel.'The editorial approach is historical, chronological, and biographical. The introduction locates E.J. Pratt in his Newfoundland and Canadian contexts, and discusses the development of his work in relation to his early modernist contemporaries, concluding that Pratt remains the most important and influential Canadian poet up to the mid-fifties. As such, he has been a key figure in shaping the Canadian literary imagination of his day and the later poetics of landscape adopted by Earle Birney and Margaret Atwood.The editors provide annotations, textual notes, and a biographical chronology. The printed volume is supplemented by the electronic resources of the Selected Pratt website at www.trentu.ca/pratt/selected.

Sandra Djwa has provided readers with a fascinating artifact: a cultural biography with a human face. Roy Daniells (1902-1979), an English professor who finished his career at the University of British Columbia, and an outstanding scholar, teacher and poet, influenced at least four generations of students and is the subject of Professing English. Once established as a professor, Daniells was a key figure - a cultural catalyst - in the consolidation of English as a discipline and the development of Canadian literature as a recognised body of writing and a legitimate focus of scholarship, interacting with major personalities of the era like Earle Birney, Northrop Frye, E.J. Pratt, Sinclair Ross, Margaret Laurence and A.S.P. Woodhouse. Djwa's examination of his life is a moving personal story as well as a mini-history of literary studies in Canada. It is also the account of an individual struggling against a strict religious upbringing who turned instead to the devotional poets of the seventeenth century. In this biography, Daniells' life becomes a prism refracting aspects of the discipline - the old ties between religion and literature, the making of a professor, mentorship and the way it functioned, women in the academy and changes in the discipline and the professoriate. His devotion to English studies and his unflagging encouragement of young Canadian writers and students makes Daniells one of the greatest unsung heroes in recent history. Thanks to this wonderful biography, he will receive the recognition he so justly deserves.

This volume of E.J. Pratt's selected poems introduces Pratt's poems to the college and university student, to provide the kind of information needed for an informed reading of the poems. The volume offers a full sampling of Pratt's poems chosen on the joint basis of representativeness and intrinsic value. This includes the major long poems, The Witches' Brew, The Iron Door, The Titanic, Brébeuf and His Brethren, Towards the Last Spike, and important shorter lyrics including 'Newfoundland,' 'Come Away, Death,' and 'From Stone to Steel.'The editorial approach has been historical, chronological and biographical. The introduction locates Pratt in his Newfoundland and Canadian contexts and discusses the development of his work in terms of his early modernist contemporaries, concluding that E.J. Pratt remains the most important and influential Canadian poet up to the mid-fifties. As such, he has been an key figure in shaping the Canadian literary imagination of his day and the later poetics of landscape adopted by Earle Birney and Margaret Atwood.The reader is provided with annotations, textual notes, a biographical chronology, and an introduction which locates Pratt in his Newfoundland and Canadian contexts and discusses the development of his work in terms of his modernist contemporaries. The printed volumes is supplemented by the electronic resources of the Selected Pratt website at http://www.trentu.ca/pratt/selected.