Biographical Note

Anne Szumigalski was born in 1922 in London, England, and grew up in a Hampshire village. Her family was large, close and eccentric. A precocious lover of poetry, she began to write at a very early age.

She joined the British Red Cross upon the outbreak of war, and worked with Belgian refugees in England before serving in Europe as a medical auxiliary, interpreter and welfare officer as the Second World War came to an end. She married a Polish exile, Jan Szumigalski, and spent four years with him in rural Wales. In 1951 they immigrated to Canada, where they raised two daughters and two sons. The family lived in the Big Muddy region of southern Saskatchewan, then moved to Saskatoon in 1956. The city would be Anne Szumigalski's home for the rest of her life.

Her first book, Woman Reading in Bath, was published by Doubleday in New York in 1974. Thereafter she remained loyal to prairie publishers. She was nominated three times for the Governor-General's Award, winning for Voice (1995). Her many other honours included the Saskatchewan Arts Board Lifetime Award for Excellence, life memberships in actra and the League of Canadian Poets, two Writers' Choice Awards and a Saskatchewan Order of Merit. Special issues of Prairie Fire
and Arc paid tribute to her work. She published fifteen books of writing before her death in 1999, and others have appeared since.

The depth and breadth of her involvement in the Saskatchewan literary community are hard to overestimate. Anne was a founding member of the Saskatchewan Writers Guild, a founding editor of Grain, and the first writer-in-residence at the Saskatoon Public Library. She taught for many years at the Saskatchewan Summer School of the Arts, and served as an informal mentor to countless young and aspiring writers. Apart from her collaborations with other writers, she enjoyed working with dancers, musicians, actors, visual artists, translators and filmmakers. Each year her name continues to be recalled by an Anne Szumigalski Memorial Scholarship, an Anne Szumigalski Editor's Prize and an Anne Szumigalski Memorial Lecture.