Elspeth Cameron
Canadian Author and Biographer
Elspeth Cameron, Canadian Author and Biographer, has written three biographies of Canadian literary giants: novelist Hugh MacLennan, poet Irving Layton, and poet Earle Birney. Her first biography, Hugh MacLennan: A Writer’s Life, University of Toronto Press, 1981, was hailed as the first full-length biography of a Canadian writer. It was short-listed for the Governor-General’s Award and won the U.B.C. Canadian Biography Award. She has also written three other books and numerous profiles of Canadian cultural figures such as Peter Newman, Jack McClelland, Veronica Tennant, Anne Murray, Howard Engel, Janette Turner Hospital, and Timothy Findlay, winning several journalism awards. Her work has appeared in such magazines as Saturday Night, Chatelaine, Maclean’s, Leisureways, and a number of academic journals. Her greatest regret? “I was too busy to take an assignment to interview Hugh Hefner at his Playboy mansion at the time he married a Canadian woman.” She has edited seven books.
Dr. Cameron has taught Canadian Literature and Canadian Studies at Concordia University, York University, The University of Toronto, and Brock University, where she is now an Adjunct Professor of English. She headed one of the first Canadian Studies programs in Canada at Loyola College (Concordia) in 1970. “No one would let me write a Ph.D. thesis on a Canadian writer at U of T in 1965,” she says. “They told me that there wasn’t enough Canadian writing of any importance and that I would not get a job in that field.”
Her latest book, And Beauty Answers, The Life of Frances Loring and Florence Wyle, released November 18, 2007, is a major biography of two major Toronto sculptors: Frances Loring and Florence Wyle.
On Biography:
“Having assumed what might be called a series of subject positions approximating as closely as possible those typical of the personality in question, the biographer returns, like the Ancient Mariner, compelled to recount that astonishing and exciting voyage into another self.”
“The deepest truth of biography comes as result both of a long-term immersion in whatever materials are available to the biographer and of an in-and-out immersion in the personality of the subject.”
Elspeth Cameron,
“Truth in Biography,” 1992
Welcome to the Official Website of Elspeth Cameron
“Shrewd, scandalous, compassionate and breathtakingly readable, Elspeth Cameron’s book on Layton sets a new standard for cultural biography in this country. Amazingly, she has found a way to do justice to one of the most remarkable Canadian lives of the country.”
Robert Fulford, Editor, Saturday Night
Hugh MacLennan, after reading Cameron’s biography: “Your book astounded me. It’s meticulously accurate. You’ve got me cold. I’m lost in admiration. I loved your quiet humour. Had I read this book when I was younger, I would have made fewer mistakes. Since reading your book, I feel more peaceful.”
“I have only praise for Cameron’s handling of disparate sources - letters, interviews, histories, public records, Birney’s creative work - to synthesize a compelling narrative. She deftly charts both Birney’s rootedness in and struggles within his historical circumstances. The picture that emerges is by no means entirely attractive,” (Ian Adam, University of Toronto Quarterly)
“And Beauty
Answers”
Now in
bookstores
Two lower photographs courtesy of Terry Murray.
