McGill Library
McLennan Library Building3459 rue McTavish
Montreal, Quebec
H3A 0C9
Identity area
Type of entity
Person
Authorized form of name
Schermbrucker, Bill, 1938-2019
Parallel form(s) of name
Standardized form(s) of name according to other rules
Other form(s) of name
Identifiers for corporate bodies
Description area
Dates of existence
1938-2019
History
William “Bill” Gerald Schermbrucker was born on July 23, 1938, in Eldoret, Kenya.
He was a Canadian writer, editor, literary critic, and educator. He taught at Delamere High School, Prince of Wales School in Nairobi and Alliance High School in Kikuyu before immigrating to Canada in 1964. In 1973, he earned a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of British Columbia. His fictionalized memoir about his mother in Africa, “Mimosa” (1987), won the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize in 1988. He is the author of the book about his youth in Kenya “Chameleon and Other Stories” (1983) and a collection of short stories "Motortherapy" (1993). Schermbrucker also wrote a textbook, “The Aims and Strategies of Good Writing (1976). He is widely respected as one of the founding faculty of Capilano College, where he edited The Capilano Review from 1976 to 1982.
He died on September 14, 2019, in Vancouver, British Columbia.