Canadian poet
Anne Szumigalski, SOM (b. 3 January 1922 in London, England, d. 22 April 1999) was a Canadian poet.
Life.
She was born Anne Howard Davis in London, England, and grew up mostly in a Hampshire village. She served with the Red Cross as a medical auxiliary officer and interpreter during World War II, following British Army forces in 1944-5 across parts of newly liberated Europe. In 1946, she married Jan Szumigalski, (d. 1985) a former officer in the Polish Army, and lived with him in north Wales before immigrating to Canada in 1951. They had four children: Kate (born 1946), Elizabeth (1947), Tony (1961) and Mark (1963). She spent the rest of her life in Saskatchewan, first in the remote Big Muddy valley, then in Saskatoon.
Writing career.
Most of her fifteen books are collections of poetry, but she also wrote a memoir, "The Voice, the Word, the Text" (1990) as well as "Z.", a play about the Holocaust. Her first book, "Woman Reading in Bath" (1974), was published by Doubleday in New York. Thereafter she made the deliberate choice to publish her work with Canadian presses. She helped found the Saskatchewan Writers Guild and the literary journal "Grain", and served as a mentor to many younger writers.
Szumigalski combined a love of the Canadian Prairies with a passion for language, a faith in poetry and an intimate knowledge of literary tradition. She was a great admirer of William Blake, some of whose visionary qualities appear in her own work.
Her finest work is collected in a big volume of selected poems, "On Glassy Wings" (Coteau, 1997). In 2006 her literary executor Mark Abley edited a volume of her posthumous poems, "When Earth Leaps Up." A final posthumous book is expected in 2010.
The Manitoba Writers Guild has set up a scholarship in her name. The Saskatchewan Book Award for Poetry is named for her. Her papers are held at the University of Regina, and University of Saskatchewan.
Awards.
In 1989, she was awarded the Saskatchewan Order of Merit. Her 1995 collection "Voice", featuring paintings by Marie Elyse St. George, won the Governor General's Award for English language poetry. She also received many other honours over the years.
References.
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