Jack Hodgins

Jack Hodgins is a Canadian novelist, short-story writer, and teacher born in 1938. Raised in Merville in the Comox Valley on Vancouver Island, he has drawn on the region’s landscapes and communities in fiction marked by expansive storytelling, comic elements, and imaginative transformations. The Government of Canada has noted the prominence of Vancouver Island’s people and places in his work.

After earning a Bachelor of Education at the University of British Columbia, Hodgins taught secondary-school English in the Nanaimo district before becoming a visiting professor at the University of Ottawa and then teaching in the University of Victoria’s Department of Writing. His early collection Spit Delaney's Island was followed by novels including The Invention of the World and The Resurrection of Joseph Bourne, which received the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction. The catalogued novel Broken Ground examines settlers trying to cultivate land granted to First World War veterans on Vancouver Island.

Hodgins received the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize for Broken Ground, the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence, and the Lorne Pierce Medal. He was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada in 2010, in recognition of his fiction and his work as a teacher and mentor. His literary papers, including manuscripts, drafts, correspondence, and other records, are preserved in the Jack Hodgins fonds at Library and Archives Canada.