William New was born in 1938 in Vancouver, British Columbia, the city where he currently lives. A graduate of the University of British Columbia and the University of Leeds, and a prize-winning teacher and writer, he was awarded the Royal Society of Canada's Lorne Pierce Medal in 2004, and for his services to creative and critical writing he was named an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2006.His books of history and literary commentary range from Articulating West (1972) to Land Sliding (1997), A History of Canadian Literature (2nd ed., 2003), and several studies of poetry, the short story, irony, and postcolonial narrative, as in Dreams of Speech and Violence (1987) and Reading Mansfield and Metaphors of Form (1999). Editor of the Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada (2002), he has also studied how the personal and the local affect political attitudes, as in Borderlands (1998) and Grandchild of Empire (2003).William New's creative works include five books for children, from Vanilla Gorilla 1998) to the internationally honoured The Year I Was Grounded (2008); and his poetry collections range from Science Lessons (1996) to Underwood Log (2004, shortlisted for the Governor General's Award), YVR (2011, winner of the City of Vancouver Award), and New & Selected Poems (2015).
