Dorothy Livesay was born in Winnipeg (1909), educated at the Universities of Toronto and British Columbia and the Sorbonne. She married and lived in Vancouver from the late 1930s until 1958. She worked for UNESCO in Paris and Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) from 1959 to 1963. She returned to Canada as writer-in-residence at several universities until the late 1980s, while continuing her own work. Her first collection, Green Pitcher, was published in 1928 when she was 19. In 1944 Livesay won the Governor General’s Award for her book of poetry Day and Night. In 1947 her most critically acclaimed work, Poems for People, captured a second Governor General’s Award and the Lorne Pierce Medal for Literature. A major figure in the rise of modernist poetry in Canada, Livesay mentored generations of Canadian poets. Her literary career spanned 70 years, she wrote more than two dozen books, received eight honorary degrees as well as the Orders of Canada and B.C. Livesay died in Victoria on December 29, 1996.