Heather Spears

Heather Spears, poet, novelist, artist (b at Vancouver, BC 1934). Educated at the Vancouver School of Art and the University of British Columbia, Heather Spears has lived in Denmark since 1962, where she owns the Upper Canada Gallery. She returns to Canada annually for reading and lecture tours.

Heather Spears poetry frequently explores the connection between drawings and poems, art forms where accurate lines "with casual authority / move over the page, making closures / on suddenly touchable form." The title poem of The Danish Portraits (1967) is a sequence of lyrics in which a painter meditates on his relationship with the subject of his portraiture.

Her books often feature her poetry and artwork side by side; Drawings from the Newborn (1986) features poems and drawings of infants in crisis. The Panum Poems (1996) was written when Spears took anatomical drawing classes at the Panum Institute, Denmark, and Required Reading (2000) features Spears's work as a courtroom artist at the Reena Virk trials.

Heather Spears's other volumes of poetry, characterized by a meticulous and painterly attention to visual detail, include From the Inside (1972); How to Read Faces (1986); which won the Pat Lowther Memorial Award; The Word for Sand (1988), which won the Governor General's Award for poetry and a second Pat Lowther Memorial Award; Human Acts (1991); Poems Selected and New (1999); and Line by Line (2002), drawings of Canadian poets and their poems.

Heather Spears also writes fiction. In the 1990s she wrote The Moonfall Trilogy: Moonfall (1991), The Children of Atwar (1993) and The Taming (1996), a fantasy fiction trilogy set on a post-holocaust Earth inhabited by twins sharing the same body. She has since turned her attention to crime fiction, publishing The Flourish in 2004.