Kinsella suffered a car accident in 1997 which resulted in a long hiatus in his fiction-writing career until the publication of the novel, Butterfly Winter. The collection Fencepost Chronicles won the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour in 1987.īefore becoming a professional author, he was a professor of English at the University of Calgary in Alberta. Kinsella's eight books of short stories about life on a First Nations reserve were the basis for the movie Dance Me Outside and CBC television series The Rez, both of which Kinsella considers very poor quality. He had not been listed in the film's credits, and was not acknowledged by director Christine Lahti in her acceptance speech – a full-page advertisement was later placed in Variety apologizing to Kinsella for the error. A short story by Kinsella, Lieberman in Love, was the basis for a short film that won the Academy Award for Live Action Short Film – the Oscar win came as a surprise to the author, who, watching the award telecast from home, had no idea the film had been made and released. Kinsella's most famous work is Shoeless Joe, upon which the movie Field of Dreams was based. In 1991, he was presented with an honorary Doctor of Literature degree from the University of Victoria. He travelled down to Iowa and earned a Master of Fine Arts in English degree through the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1978. Though he had been writing since he was a child (winning a YMCA contest at age 14), he began taking writing courses at the University of Victoria in 1970, receiving his Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing there in 1974. In 1967, he moved to Victoria, British Columbia, running a pizza restaurant called Caesar's Italian Village and driving a taxi. When he was ten, the family moved to Edmonton.Īs an adult, he held a variety of jobs in Edmonton, including as a clerk for the Government of Alberta and managing a credit bureau. 'I'm one of these people who woke up at age five knowing how to read and write,' he says.

Kinsella was raised until he was 10 years-old at a homestead near Darwell, Alberta, 60 km west of the city, home-schooled by his mother and taking correspondence courses. William Patrick Kinsella was born to John Matthew Kinsella and Olive Kinsella in Edmonton, Alberta. His work has often concerned baseball and Canada's First Nations and other Canadian issues. William Patrick Kinsella, OC, OBC was a Canadian novelist and short story writer.

Shoeless Joe by W.P. Kinsella