Chris Ackerley’s research area is modernism and his speciality is annotation, especially of the writings of Malcolm Lowry and Samuel Beckett. His first book (with Lawrence J. Clipper), A Companion to Under the Volcano (University of British Columbia Press, 1984), has become a standard reference. He has annotated Swinging the Maelstrom (2013) and In Ballast to the White Sea (2014), the first two volumes in the Lowry trilogy published by the University of Ottawa Press. He has co-authored (with S. E. Gontarski) the Grove Press and Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett (Grove Press, 2004; Faber and Faber, 2006) and has annotated Beckett’s novels Murphy (1998) and Watt (2006), both reprinted by Edinburgh University Press (2010). More recently (2012–2015) Ackerley won a prestigious research award from the Royal Society of New Zealand for a major study of the medieval and traditional roots of the modernist aesthetic, which includes a study of Samuel Beckett and Science.
Frederick Asals, Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto, is author of The Making of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (University of Georgia Press, 1997), the definitive study of Lowry’s creation of his 1947 masterpiece. Asals co-edited (with Paul Tiessen) A Darkness That Murmured: Essays on Malcolm Lowry and the Twentieth Century (University of Toronto Press, 2000), a collection of studies taken largely from the Lowry conference held at the University of Toronto in 1997. He has presented papers on Lowry at a number of international conferences and has published essays on Lowry in scholarly journals and as book chapters. He has also published numerous essays on Flannery O’Connor, as well as the volume Flannery O’Connor: The Imagination of Extremity (University of Georgia Press, 1982), winner of the Explicator Prize for Best Book of 1982.
Vik Doyen completed his MA thesis on Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano in 1968. He then studied at the University of Pennsylvania and did archival research in the Malcolm Lowry Collection at the University of British Columbia for his doctoral dissertation, Fighting the Albatross of Self: A Genetic Study of the Literary Work of Malcolm Lowry (Katholieke Universiteit te Leuven, 1973). In 1984 he returned to UBC for archival research on Lowry’s October Ferry to Gabriola and published “From Innocent Story to Charon’s Boat: Reading the October Ferry Mss,” in Sherrill Grace’s edition of Swinging the Maelstrom: New Perspectives on Malcolm Lowry (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992). In 1987 he taught, together with Chris Ackerley, a UBC graduate seminar on the manuscripts of the Malcolm Lowry Collection. He also presented papers at Lowry international conferences in Norwich (1978), Vancouver (1987 and 2009), Toronto (1997), Antwerp (2005) and Brighton (2007). He is editor of Swinging the Maelstrom (2013), the first in the volumes of the Lowry trilogy published by the University of Ottawa Press.
David Large is a research and teaching assistant at the University of Otago in New Zealand. He has conducted archival research at the Huntington Library in Pasadena and the Malcolm Lowry Collection at the University of British Columbia, and in 2014 completed his Ph.D. thesis on Malcolm Lowry’s composition and editorial process, On to Genesis: Malcolm Lowry, “Ultramarine”, and Consequential Modernism at the University of Sydney. Since 2012, he has presented his research on Lowry at international conferences in Canberra, Sydney, Brisbane, Dunedin, Cerisy-la-Salle, and London. With Chris Ackerley he edits an annotation website dedicated to Under the Volcano.
Patrick A. McCarthy is a professor of English at the University of Miami and editor of the James Joyce Literary Supplement. His publications on Malcolm Lowry include Forests of Symbols: World, Text, and Self in Malcolm Lowry’s Fiction (University of Georgia Press, 1994); Malcolm Lowry’s “La Mordida”: A Scholarly Edition, ed. (University of Georgia Press, 1996); Joyce/Lowry: Critical Perspectives, co-ed. with Paul Tiessen (University Press of Kentucky, 1997); “Totality and Fragmentation in Lowry and Joyce,” in A Darkness That Murmured: Essays on Malcolm Lowry and the Twentieth Century, ed. Frederick Asals and Paul Tiessen (University of Toronto Press, 2000); “Modernism’s Swansong: Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano,” in A Companion to the British and Irish Novel 1945–2000, ed. Brian Shaffer (Blackwell, 2005); and “Under the Volcano,” in The Literary Encyclopedia (online). He is editor of In Ballast to the White Sea (2014), the second volume in the Lowry trilogy published by the University of Ottawa Press.
Miguel Mota is an associate professor of English at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He has published on numerous twentieth-century and contemporary writers and filmmakers, including Derek Jarman, Jeanette Winterson, Peter Greenaway, John King, Mike Leigh, and Malcolm Lowry. His work on Lowry includes The Cinema of Malcolm Lowry: A Scholarly Edition of Lowry’s “Tender Is the Night” (University of British Columbia Press, 1990; with Paul Tiessen); “‘We simply made one up’: The Hybrid Text of ‘Tender Is the Night’,” in A Darkness That Murmured: Essays on Malcolm Lowry,” ed. Frederick Asals and Paul Tiessen (University of Toronto Press, 2000); “The Tyranny of Words: Malcolm Lowry’s Tender Is the Night,” in Canadian Literature 154 (1997); “Authoring Lowry: The Role of the Paratext in the Fiction of Malcolm Lowry,” in English Studies in Canada 22.4 (1996); and “Malcolm Lowry,” in the Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada, ed. William H. New (University of Toronto Press, 2002). He was the organizer, with Richard Lane, of the 2009 Centenary Lowry conference in Vancouver, and has written and directed a film documentary, After Lowry (2010). He is the co-author, with Vik Doyen, of the Introduction to Swinging the Maelstrom (University of Ottawa Press, 2013).
Paul Tiessen, founding editor of the Malcolm Lowry Newsletter (1977–1984) and The Malcolm Lowry Review (1984–2002) and Professor Emeritus at Wilfrid Laurier University, has published numerous scholarly articles and book chapters on Malcolm Lowry. He also wrote the introduction for Malcolm and Margerie Lowry’s Notes on a Screenplay for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night (Bruccoli Clark, 1976) and edited The Letters of Malcolm Lowry and Gerald Noxon 1940–1952 (University of British Columbia Press, 1988) and Apparently Incongruous Parts: The Worlds of Malcolm Lowry (Scarecrow Press, 1990). He co-edited The Cinema of Malcolm Lowry: A Scholarly Edition of Lowry’s “Tender Is the Night” (UBC Press, 1990; with Miguel Mota); Joyce/Lowry: Critical Perspectives (University Press of Kentucky, 1997; with Patrick A. McCarthy); and A Darkness That Murmured: Essays on Malcolm Lowry and the Twentieth Century (University of Toronto Press, 2000; with Frederick Asals).