ABOUT

John Wilson Foster is a Canadian and Irish writer and scholar.  He was born and reared in Belfast, Northern Ireland and graduated in English, philosophy, and social anthropology from Queen’s University. He earned his doctorate in English in the United States at the University of Oregon, Eugene. He spent his teaching and research career at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, and is now a freelance writer and honorary research professor at Queen’s University, Belfast.  

Foster was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2010. The John Wilson Foster archive is at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. His biography appears in Modern Irish Lives: Dictionary of 20th-century Biography (1996), ed. Louis McRedmond, Contemporary Authors (Thompson Gale, 2007),  and Canadian Who's Who (Grey House, 2011). 

He has given many public readings and lectures, and made numerous radio broadcasts. 

Foster has been a folksinger, songwriter and poet. A lifelong birder, his favourite birdwatching haunts are the Fraser River delta south of Vancouver, the Osoyoos-Oliver corridor in the Okanagan desert, British Columbia, and Strangford Lough, County Down on the shores of which he now lives.