Anne Szumigalski
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Anne Szumigalski (3 January 1922 – 22 April 1999) was a Canadian poet.
Szumigalski was born in London, England, and grew up mostly in Hampshire. After serving with the Red Cross as a medical auxiliary officer and interpreter during World War II, Szumigalski immigrated with her husband Jan Szumigalski, a former officer in the Polish Army, to Canada in 1951. She spent the rest of her life in Saskatchewan, first in the remote Big Muddy valley, then in Saskatoon. She helped found the Saskatchewan Writers Guild and the literary journal Grain, and served as a mentor to many younger writers. Most of her fifteen books are collections of poetry, but she also wrote a memoir, The Voice, the Word, the Text (1990) as well as Z., a play about the Holocaust. Her 1995 collection Voice, featuring paintings by Marie Elyse St George, won the Governor General's Award for English language poetry. In 1989, she was awarded the Saskatchewan Order of Merit. Her most important book is perhaps a volume of her selected poems, On Glassy Wings (1997). In 2006 Mark Abley edited a volume of her posthumous poems, When Earth Leaps Up. Szumigalski combined a love of the Canadian Prairies with a passion for language and an intimate knowledge of poetic tradition. She was a great admirer of William Blake, some of whose visionary qualities appear in her own work.
