Robert Kroetsch

Robert Paul Kroetsch (June 26, 1927 – June 21, 2011) was a Canadian novelist, poet and nonfiction writer. In his fiction and critical essays, as well as in the journal he co-founded, boundary 2, he was an influential figure in Canada in introducing ideas about postmodernism.

He was born in Heisler, Alberta. He began his academic career at Binghamton University (State University of New York); after returning to Canada in the mid-1970s he taught at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg. Kroetsch is well known for his influential 1977 long poem Seed Catalogue, published by Turnstone Press, "which is to Albertans what Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass is to Americans." Kroetsch's 1969 novel The Studhorse Man won the 1969 Governor General's Award for Fiction, while he was also nominated for the Governor General's Award for Poetry for his volume The Hornbooks of Rita K.

Kroetsch spent several years in Victoria, British Columbia, before returning to Winnipeg, then to retirement in Alberta, where he continued to write. In 2004 he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. Kroetsch died in an automobile accident returning home from a literary festival in 2011.