George McWhirter

First Poet Laureate of Vancouver, B.C.
  2007 - 2009

Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and educated at Queen's University Belfast, where he was a classmate of Seamus Deane, Seamus Heaney and the Irish literary critic, Robert Dunbar. George McWhirter came to Canada and Vancouver Island in 1966, leaving for Vancouver in 1968. 

On March 13th, 2007 he was inaugurated as Vancouver's first Poet Laureate. He is the author of eight books of verse, editor and translator of poetry by major Mexican poets and has won the Commonwealth Prize for poetry, the FR Scott Prize for Translation, and the Ethel Wilson Prize at the BC. Book Awards for fiction.

For almost thirty years he was the Advisory Editor of PRISM international magazine. He is a translator of his verse and friend of Homero Aridjis, who has just been appointed as Mexico's Ambassador to UNESCO in Paris.

At UBC he won two Killam prizes, one for Teaching and one for Mentoring, as well as the Sam Black award for his contribution to the Creative & Performing Arts. His version of HECUBA by Euripides will be/was performed by the Blackbird Theatre Company at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre, December 28, 2007 - January 12, 2008.