David Stouck

David Hamilton Stouck was born in 1940 in Beamsville, Ontario and raised on a farm in the Niagara Peninsula. He was educated at McMaster University (1963) and the University of Toronto (1964) and was employed for 40 years in the English Department at Simon Fraser University. He lives with his wife, Mary-Ann, in West Vancouver. They have two children and two grandchildren.

As a literary critic and biographer Stouck has explored the importance of landscape in the arts: Willa Cather’s great plains, Sinclair Ross’s Saskatchewan prairie, Ethel Wilson’s British Columbia. In his biography of Arthur Erickson he focuses on the architect’s integration of buildings with their settings: Simon Fraser University terracing a coastal mountaintop, the University of Lethbridge outlining a prairie coulee, Vancouver’s Museum of Anthropology celebrating a shoreline, and domestic homes shoring up hillsides and defining forests.

As an editor and historian he has been concerned to rescue fragile documents, especially letters, and to make them part of the public record.[1]

Books (monographs and editions)

Awards

Ethel Wilson: A Critical Biography, was shortlisted for the VanCity Book Prize and Collecting Stamps Would Have Been More Fun: The Correspondence of Sinclair Ross 1933-86, was a finalist for the Alberta Book Prize.

"Arthur Erickson: An Architect's Life" was shortlisted for six literary awards including the RBC Taylor Prize and won four awards: two BC Book prizes named for Hubert Evans and Roderick Haig-Brown, UBC Library's book prize named for Basil Stuart-Stubbs, and the City of Vancouver Book Award.

References