Page, P. K. (Patricia Kathleen), 1916-2010 : The poet and artist P.K. Page was born in Swanage, England, the daughter of a military officer, Lionel Frank Page, who rose to the rank of Major General in the Canadian army after bringing his family to Canada in 1919. P.K. Page spent most of her youth in Calgary but moved with her family to Rothesay, New Brunswick, in 1935. She went to Saint John in the late 1930s, where she worked as a radio actress and tried to establish a children's theatre with a friend. She moved to Montreal in the early 1940s, where she met poets F.R. Scott and Patrick Anderson and joined them in publishing the little magazine Preview.
Page's first published poem, The Moth, appeared in 1934, and between 1939 and 1942 a number of her poems were published in Canadian Poetry Magazine and Contemporary Verse. After she moved to Montreal, both her poetry and short stories appeared in Preview and in 1944 she published a novel, The Sun and the Moon, under the nom-de-plume Judith Cape. In that same year, Ronald Hambleton included twelve of her poems in his anthology, Unit of Five. Her first collection of poetry, As Ten, As Twenty, was published two years later.
Page moved to Ottawa in 1946 to work as a scriptwriter for the National Film Board. In 1950, she married National Film Board Commissioner W.A. Irwin, who later joined the diplomatic service. She subsequently spent nearly a decade away from Canada, travelling with her husband on diplomatic postings to Australia 1953-1956, Brazil 1956-1959, and Mexico 1960-1964. They returned to Canada in 1964 and settled in Victoria, British Columbia.
P.K. Page won the Governor-General's Award for her poetry collection The Metal and the Flower in 1954. Cry Ararat! was published in 1967 and a fourth collection, Poems Selected and New, in 1974. Evening Dance of the Grey Flies appeared in 1981 and included a futuristic/allegorical short story called Unless the Eye Catch Fire.... Another selection of poems, The Glass Air, was published in 1985 and excerpts from Page's travel diaries were published as Brazilian Journal (1987). In 1994, Hologram was published, in which Page pays homage to fourteen other poets through the poetic convention of glosas. In 1997, all the poems appearing in her previous titles were re-published in the two-volume collected works, The Hidden Room, edited by Stan Dragland. Rosa dei Venti/Compass Rose, Italian translations of Page's poetry by Francesca Valente, was published by Longo Editore in 1998. A collaboration between P.K. Page and Philip Stratford on a renga poem resulted in And Once More Saw the Stars (2001). In 2002 Page was short-listed for the Griffin Prize for a new book of poetry, Planet Earth, and her first U.S. publication, Cosmologies: Poems Selected and New, followed in 2003.
An autobiographical poem, Hand Luggage: A Memoir in Verse, was published in 2006 and in 2007, Page's second collection of short stories, Up on the Roof, was published as was The Filled Pen: Selected Non-Fiction, a collection of essays, edited by Zailig Pollock. The final two works to be published during Page's lifetime are the poetry collections "Coal and Roses" (2009; shortlisted for the 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize) and "The Golden Lilies, poems by P.K. Page" (2009).
Page has also written children's books, including A Flask of Sea Water (1989), The Travelling Musicians (1991), The Goat that Flew (1994), A Grain of Sand (2003), A Brazilian Alphabet for the Young Reader (2005), and Jake the Baker Makes a Cake (2008). In 1995 Page collaborated with Harry Somers on A Children's Hymn to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the United Nations and in 2001 she wrote the lyrics for A Children's Millennium Song (music by Oscar Peterson) for the ceremonial opening of the Trans Canada Trail.
As well as being a poet, P.K. Page is a well-known artist, painting under the name P.K. Irwin. Her work illustrates Cry Ararat! and Brazilian Journal and is represented in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Canada.
A film about P.K. Page was produced in 1991 by the National Film Board of Canada. In 2001 her poem Planet Earth was selected to be read on international grounds (Mount Everest, West Philippines Sea, Antarctica and the United Nations) as part of the United Nations' Dialogue Among Civilizations Through Poetry program, and in 2002 Trent University hosted a symposium, Extraordinary Presence: The Worlds of P.K. Page. Page is recipient of honorary degrees from University of Victoria (1985), Calgary (1989), Guelph (1990), Simon Fraser (1990), Toronto (1998), Winnipeg (2001) and Trent (2004) and the University of British Columbia (2005). She was appointed Companion of the Order of Canada in 1999.
Page died in Victoria in 2010.
