W.P. Kinsella

He was awarded the O.C. (Officer of the Order of Canada) on April 22, 1993 for his services to Canadian Literature.

Although 'J. D. Salinger' appeared as a character in W. P. Kinsella's 1982 novel 'Shoeless Joe' the inclusion did not exactly please the noted author. Not long after Salinger's death in January, 2010, Kinsella recalled in Maclean's Magazine: "His lawyers wrote my publisher's lawyers saying he was outraged and offended to be portrayed in the novel, and they would be very unhappy if it were transferred to other media."Hence, when 'Shoeless Joe' came to the movies as 'Field of Dreams' the Salinger character was dropped in favor of the entirely fictionalized Terence Mann, envisioned as a writer who was to the 1960s generation what J. D. Salinger had been to the generation of the 1950s.

He began writing in childhood and won a YMCA contest at age 14. He took writing courses at the University of Victoria, and received a bachelor of arts in creative writing in 1974. In 1978, he earned a master of fine arts in English through the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. He was an English professor at the University of Calgary before becoming a professional author.