Daphne Marlatt (née Buckle) was born on July 11, 1942, in Melbourne, Australia.

She is a Canadian poet, novelist, editor, and playwright. After spending her childhood in Malaysia, her family moved to Canada in 1951. She studied at the University of British Columbia (B.A., 1964) and Indiana University (M.A., 1968). She taught creative writing and literature at Capilano College, Vancouver, and edited many literary journals and magazines. In 1983, she helped organize the first Women and Words conference in Vancouver, which united writers from both English- and French-speaking Canada. With her deepening feminism, she became one of the founding editors of Tessera, a Canadian journal of feminist theory and writing (1984). Marlatt has published more than twenty books that are hybrid forms of poetry, autobiography, prose, travelogue, essay, theory, historical fiction, journal, and manifesto, e.g., "Frames of a Story" (1968), "Rings" (1971), "Vancouver Poems" (1972), "Steveston" (1974), "Zócalo" (1977), "Touch to My Tongue" (1984), "Rivering: The Poetry of Daphne Marlatt" (2014), and "Intertidal, collection of poems" (2017). In 2006, she was made a Member of the Order of Canada. Her play “The Gull”, the first Canadian play staged in the ancient, ritualized tradition of Japanese Noh, won the prestigious 2008 Uchimura Naoya Prize. She is also a recipient of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize (2009) and George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award (2012).

Marlatt lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Beatrice Isabel Allen was the daughter of granddaughter of Andrew Allan and Matthew Hamilton Gault. She married Sir Herbert Meredith Marler in 1902.

Sir Herbert Meredith Marler, PC, KCMG (1876-1940) was a Canadian notary and diplomat. Born in Montreal, Quebec, he earned a law degree from McGill University and entered his father's notarial firm Marler & Marler. Liberal Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King appointed him Canada's first Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary of Canada to the Empire of Japan in 1929. He was knighted in 1935 and returned from Japan in 1936 to serve as Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary of Canada to the United States of America. He served in that capacity until 1939. He was married to Montreal socialite Beatrice Isabel Allan, granddaughter of Andrew Allan and Matthew Hamilton Gault.