Elizabeth Brewster

Elizabeth Winifred Brewster, (26 August 1922 – 26 December 2012) was a Canadian poet, author, and academic.Born in the small town of Chipman, New Brunswick, Brewster was the youngest of Frederick John and Ethel May (Day) Brewsters five children. The family was of limited means, and although she was a physically frail child with a sporadic early education, Brewster was a keen reader of any material that presented itself, including literary classics and the Eatons catalogue. Her first poem, submitted by her father and accepted by the Saint John Telegraph-Journal, was published when she was twelve years old. After she graduated from high school in 1942, Brewster entered the University of New Brunswick on a small scholarship. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1946, a Master of Arts from Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1947, then began her Ph.D. at Indiana University, before electing to travel to England on a Beaverbrook overseas scholarship to study at Kings College, London from 1949-50. She later earned a Bachelor of Library Science from the University of Toronto, and returned in 1957 to Indiana University Bloomington to complete her Ph.D., which she received in 1962. She was a professor at the University of Saskatchewan, where she taught literature and creative writing from 1972 until she retired in 1990.A founding member in 1945 of the Canadian literary journal The Fiddlehead, Brewster went on to publish over twenty collections of her poetry, five books of fiction, and two memoirs. Over the course of her long career, she was a recipient of the E.J. Pratt Award for poems from her second book Lillooet, the Saskatchewan Lifetime Achievement Award in 1995, an honorary doctorate from the University of New Brunswick, the 2003 Saskatchewan Book Award for Poetry, a Saskatchewan Order of Merit in 2008, and the Queens Diamond Jubilee Medal, among other honours. Her poetry collection Footnotes to the Book of Job was shortlisted for the 1996 Governor Generals Award, and in 2001, she was made a Member of the Order of Canada, Canadas highest civilian honour.

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