Head and shoulders image of Elizabeth Brewster, professor of English, seated with a book in her hands.

Bio/Historical Note: Elizabeth Winifred Brewster was born 26 August 1922 in Chipman, New Brunswick. As a young child she was a keen reader of any material that presented itself, including literary classics and the Eaton’s catalogue. Her first poem, submitted by her father and accepted by the Saint John Telegraph-Journal, was published when she was 12 years old. After she graduated from high school in 1942, Brewster entered the University of New Brunswick on an entrance scholarship. She received a BA in 1946, an MA from Harvard's Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1947, then began her PhD at Indiana University, before electing to travel to England on a Beaverbrook overseas scholarship to study at King's College, London from 1949-1950. She later earned a BLS from the University of Toronto, then returned in 1957 to Indiana University Bloomington to complete her PhD on the work of English poet George Crabbe and graduated in 1962. She was a professor at the University of Saskatchewan, where she taught literature and creative writing from 1972 until she retired in 1990. A founding member in 1945 of the Canadian literary journal The Fiddlehead, Brewster went on to publish over twenty collections of her poetry, five books of fiction, and two memoirs. Over the course of her long career she was a recipient of many awards and honours, including the E.J. Pratt Award for poems from her second book Lillooet, the Saskatchewan Lifetime Achievement Award (1995), the Saskatchewan Book Award for Poetry (2003), the Saskatchewan Order of Merit (2008), and the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Meda (2012)l, and several other honours. Brewster was awarded an honorary degree from the University of New Brunswick in 1982. Her poetry collection Footnotes to the Book of Job was shortlisted for the 1996 Governor General's Award, and in 2001 she was inducted as a Member of the Order of Canada. Brewster died 26 December 2012 in Saskatoon at age 90.