P. K. Page - Life

Life

P.K. Page was born in Swanage, Dorset, England and moved with her family to Canada in 1919. Page's parents moved her to Red Deer, Alberta in 1919, when she was only 3, and later to Calgary and Winnipeg. Page said her parents were creative, encouraging non-conformists who loved the arts, recited poetry and read to her. She credited her early interest in poetry to the rhythms she unconsciously imbibed as a child. A year in England when she was 17 opened her eyes to galleries, ballets and concerts.

Page "later moved to St. John, New Brunswick, where she worked as a shop assistant and radio actress during the late 1930s."

In 1941 Page moved to Montreal and came into contact with the Montreal Group of poets, which included A. M. Klein and F. R. Scott.

She became a founding member of Patrick Anderson's Preview magazine in 1942, and of its successor, Northern Review, in 1945. Some of her poetry appeared in the modernist anthology, Unit of Five, in 1944, along with poems by Louis Dudek, Ronald Hambleton, Raymond Souster, and James Wreford.

In 1944 she published a romantic novel, The Sun and the Moon, under the pseudonym Judith Cape. (The novel was reprinted in 1973, along with some of her short stories from the 1940s, as The Sun and the Moon and Other Fictions.)

Later she became a scriptwriter at Canada's National Film Board, where she met W. Arthur Irwin, a former editor of Maclean's magazine, whom she married in 1950. Following her marriage, "Page devoted her time to writing the poetry collection The Metal and the Flower (1954), for which she received a Governor General's Award."

Page travelled with her husband on his diplomatic postings to Australia, Brazil, Mexico and Guatemala. In Brazil and Mexico, not hearing the rhythms of spoken English, she said, "I had a long dry spell, so I started painting and keeping a journal," published as Brazilian Journal and illustrated with her own paintings. She began writing poetry again following her return to Canada in the mid 1960s.

Her visual art, under her married name as P. K. Irwin, is in galleries and private collections, including the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.

She spent the last years of her life in Victoria, British Columbia.