Neighbours

What is a neighbourhood? What holds it together? What tears it apart? Each has its own geography, relying on such social networks as schools, parks, libraries, community centres, and places of worship and commerce. Each is made up of neighbours: the families in the house across the lane or those over the road, open to view or behind a hedge. Neighbours is a book that affirms; we are all neighbours, wherever we live. Following YVR, with its exploration of Vancouver, W. H. New gives shape and sound to the neighbourhood in a voice that is gentle, witty, apprehensive, and tender. These poems dare to bridge the vast space between the familiar and the mysterious, the eloquent and the colloquial.

W. H. (Bill) New is the author of eleven books of poetry, five children?s titles and the editor of many anthologies. He retired in 2003 as University Killam Professor at the University of British Columbia. A native of Vancouver, he earned an M.A. in Canadian Literature from UBC in 1963. In 1966 he was awarded his PhD from the University of Leeds, where he specialized in the English-language literatures of the Commonwealth. He then returned to the University of B.C. to set up a Commonwealth/ Postcolonial Literatures program.

Honoured by the Killam Research and Teaching Prizes (1988, 1996), the Gabrielle Roy Award (1988), the Jacob Biely Prize (1995), the Association of Canadian Studies Award of Merit (2000), and the CUFA Award for Career Achievement (2001), he was elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 1986. In 2004 he was awarded the Governor General?s International Award for Canadian Studies and the Lorne Pierce Medal for his contributions to critical and creative writing. He has taught or lectured in Australia, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, New Zealand, Spain, the UK, and the USA. In 2002, The University of Toronto Press published his Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada. It has been praised in Canada and the UK for its innovative perspective and described in France as indispensable. In 2006 he was awarded the Order of Canada. Recently he received the 20th Annual George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award.

In 2012, New was honoured to garner the City of Vancouver Mayor?s Literacy Award, and in that same year, his poetry book YVR won the City of Vancouver Book Award.