Kildare Dobbs

Kildare Robert Eric Dobbs CM OOnt (10 October 1923 – 1 April 2013^[1]) was a Canadian short story and travel writer.

Born in Meerut, Uttar Pradesh, India, he was educated in Ireland and later spent 5 years in the Royal Navy during the Second World War. After the war he worked in the British Colonial Service in Tanganyika. Dobbs came to Canada in 1952 and became a teacher, editor for Macmillan of Canada, managing editor of Saturday Night, and book editor of The Toronto Star Weekly.^[2]

In 2000, he was awarded the Order of Ontario. Dobbs lived in Toronto with his wife, Linda Kooluris Dobbs, a noted portrait artist, painter and photographer. In 2013, shortly before his death at age 89 following a period of ill health, Dobbs received the Order of Canada from the Right Honourable David Johnston, at his home in Toronto.^[3] He was cremated and his remains interred in the family grave in St Mary's (Church of Ireland) churchyard in Castlecomer, Co Kilkenny, Ireland.

Bibliography

• Running to Paradise – 1962 (winner of the 1962 Governor General's Award for Fiction)
• Reading the Time – 1968
• Canada 1964 1965
• The Great Fur Opera – 1970 (Dobson/McClelland and Stewart, ISBN 978-0-234-77609-4)
• Pride and Fall: A Novella and Six Stories – 1981 (Clarke, Irwin, ISBN 978-0-7720-1368-2)
• Historic Canada – 1984 (Methuen, ISBN 978-0-458-98530-2)
• Coastal Canada – 1985
• Anatolian Suite: Travels and Discursions in Turkey – 1989 (Little, Brown & Co., ISBN 978-0-316-18779-4)
• Ribbon of Highway: By Bus Along the Trans-Canada – 1991 (Little, Brown & Co., ISBN 978-0-316-18784-8)
• Smiles and Chukkers & Other Vanities – 1994 (Little, Brown & Co., ISBN 978-0-316-18776-3)
• The Eleventh Hour: Poems for the Third Millennium – 1997 (Mosaic, ISBN 978-0-88962-637-9)
• Casablanca: The Poem – 1999 (Ekstasis Editions, ISBN 978-1-896860-58-9)
• Running the Rapids:A Writer's Life – 2005 (Dundurn, ISBN 978-1-55002-594-1)
• "Casanova in Venice: A Raunchy Rhyme" with nine original wood engravings by Wesley W. Bates- 2010 (Porcupine's Quill, ISBN 978-0-88984-332-5)

References

• W. H. New, ed. Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002.