Member Profile

Sandra Djwa, FRSC, is a Canadian writer, critic and cultural biographer. A Newfoundlander, she completed a PhD at the University of British Columbia. She taught Canadian literature in the English department at Simon Fraser University from 1968 to 2005 when she retired as J.S. Woodsworth Resident Scholar, Humanities. Part of the seventies movement to establish the study of Canadian literature, she cofounded the Association for Canadian and Québec Literatures (ACQL) in 1973 and planned the inaugural meeting of the association in 1974. In the eighties she initiated textual studies of the poems of E.J. Pratt, was editor of Poetry, "Letters in Canada" for the University of Toronto Quarterly (1980-4), and Chair of Canadian Heads and Chairs of English (1989).

She is best known for her essays on Canadian poets and for biographies of distinguished Canadians including F.R. Scott (The Politics of the Imagination, 1987) and Roy Daniells (Professing English, 2002). Djwa's biography of Scott was shortlisted for the Hubert Evans Prize in 1988 and a French translation, "F.R. Scott: Une vie," was shortlisted for the Governor-General's Award in French Translation in 2002. Also in 2002, her biography of Roy Daniells was awarded the Lorne Pierce Gold medal for literature from the Royal Society of Canada. She recently published a biography of PK Page, Journey With No Maps (2012) which was a finalist for the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction, the Basil Stuart-Stubbs Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Book on British Columbia, the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize for B.C. Writing and the Association of Canadian and Quebec Literatures Gabrielle Roy Literary Prize. She has edited and introduced several books, including the memoirs of Carl F. Klinck.

In 1981 Sandra Djwa was awarded a Killam Senior Fellowship, in 1994 elected to the Royal Society of Canada, and in 1999 the Trimark Award for Mentoring. In 2002, she was awarded an honorary degree from Memorial University, Newfoundland. She is a general editor of the "Collected Works of P.K. Page" and is co-editing an edition of Page's letters.

She won the Governor General's Award in Non-Fiction for Journey with No Maps: A Life of P.K. Page in 2013.