Lochhead, Douglas, 1922-2011

Douglas Grant Lochhead was born on March 25, 1922, in Guelph, Ontario.

He was a Canadian poet, academic librarian, bibliographer, and educator. He graduated from McGill University (B.A., 1943) and was accepted into Medical school, but instead, he joined the Canadian Army. His experiences in the Canadian military formed the basis for his 1984 book, "The Panic Field: Prose Poems". He studied English at the University of Toronto (M.A., 1947) and Library Science at McGill University (B.L.S., 1951). Lochhead served as a librarian at Victoria College (now the University of Victoria, 1951-1952), Cornell University, New York (1953), Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia (1953-1960), York University, and the University of Toronto, where he was also a professor of English. He was the Director of Canadian Studies at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick and its writer-in-residence until his retirement in 1990. He published more than 30 collections of poetry over five decades, from 1959 to 2009. In 1976, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. In 1977, he received the Queen Elizabeth II Silver Jubilee Medal. He was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry in 1981 and won the 2005 Carlo Betocchi International Poetry Prize and the Alden Nowlan Award for Excellence in English-language Literary Arts.

In 1949, he married Jean St. Clair Beckwith (1924–1991). He died on March 15, 2011, in Sackville, New Brunswick.