Person

McFadden, David W., 1940-2018

1940-2018

David William McFadden was born on October 11, 1940, in Hamilton, Ontario.

He was a Canadian poet, novelist, and travel writer. He did not go to university but joined the Hamilton Spectator as a proofreader in the 1960s, working his way to a reporter. Following the publication of his first six poetry collections and the experimental novel “The Great Canadian Sonnet” (1974), McFadden left the Hamilton Spectator in 1976 to begin freelance editing and writing. In the 1980s, he published prolifically, including the Writer’s Block column in the Quill and Quire. He served as contributing editor for SwiftCurrent, Canadian Art, Quill and Quire and Hamilton This Month. He became writer-in-residence at Simon Fraser University in 1978 and instructor in the writing program of David Thompson University Centre in Nelson, B.C., from 1979 to 1982. He wrote poems that balanced an account of the daily life of ordinary people with a larger, metaphysical vision influenced by British Romantic poets like William Blake, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley and 19th-century American poet Walt Whitman. McFadden wrote more than 20 books of poetry, three novels and several travel books. In 2013, he won the prestigious Griffin Poetry Prize for the collection of poems "What’s the Score?". In 2014, he published a short memoir in Toronto Life about being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.

He was married to Merlin Homer. He died on June 6, 2018, in Toronto, Ontario.