Biography
Phyllis Webb was born in Victoria, B.C., in 1927, and is one of Canada’s leading poets. Acclaimed for luminous intelligence, her work is described by the Canadian Encyclopedia as "brilliantly crafted, formal in its energies and humane in its concerns.” Webb’s Peacock Blue: The Collected Poems, came out when she was 87. She received the Order of Canada in 1992, and the 1982 Governor General’s Award for Selected Poems: The Vision Tree, among many honours. “My poems are born out of great struggles with silence,” Webb has said. She was also dramatically influenced by the emergence of feminism. Naked Poems, a series of intense, haiku-inspired writings, was controversial when it came out in 1965 because of its explicitly lesbian content. Webb, also a writer and broadcaster, founded the long-running CBC radio program “Ideas.” She taught creative writing at University of British Columbia and University of Victoria until her retirement, and is a long-time resident of Salt Spring Island.