Jack Hodgins is one of the most important talents to emerge in English-Canadian fiction in the decade of the 1970s. Especially since his receiving a Governor General's Award for The Resurrection of Joseph Bourne in 1980, his work has been accorded significant national and international acclaim. In laudatory reviews Hodgins has been regularly, if perhaps somewhat inaccurately, described as a practitioner of "magic realism" and considered a Canadian counterpart to Gabriel García Márquez.

Hodgins was born to Stanley Hodgins, a logger, and Reta Blakely Hodgins on a small landholding in the Comox Valley of Vancouver Island. Since his marriage in 1960, he, his wife Diane Child Hodgins, and their three children have lived for the most part in or near the Vancouver Island logging community of Nanaimo, where, from 1961 to 1979, he was a high-school teacher. After two years as writer in residence at the University of...