"Warren Pryor"

"Warren Pryor" by Alden Nowlan

Alden Nowlan, poet, dramatist, novelist (born 25 January 1933 in Stanley, NS; died 27 June 1983 in Fredericton, NB). Winner of the Governor General’s Award for English Poetry in 1967 and recipient of the Queen’s Jubilee Medal in 1978, Alden Nowlan is regarded as one of the most original voices of his generation.

Nowlan grew up in rural poverty. His mother, Grace Reese, was 15 when he was born, his father, Freeman Nowlan, a manual laborer. Along with his younger sister Harriet, he was largely raised by his paternal grandmother. Nowlan was forced to leave school at age 10. At 14, he worked in a local sawmill, and by 16 he was walking or hitchhiking 30km to the county library where he began to pursue his lifelong passion for learning and reading. For most of his career, Nowlan supported his writing as a nightshift journalist and editor at newspapers in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. For Nowlan, poetry was “all about people, and to hell with literature.”

Nowlan’s early works expressed the life and lives he saw around him in rural Nova Scotia. His first collection, The Rose and the Puritan (1958), was rooted in the experience of alienating poverty. Under the Ice (1961), his first full-length book of poetry, reveals a poet who believed that exact and honest emotion was the most poetic form of expression.