QUICKIES

A Community Bulletin Board For Independents

Toughest School in North America

BY ALAN TWIGG

ABritish Columbia original, Anne Cameron was born in Nanaimo on August 20, 1938, and she died of bacterial pneumonia on November 30, 2022.

Easily one of the province’s most ground-breaking writers, the 16th recipient of the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award and the author of possibly the bestselling work of fiction ever published within British Columbia by a BC-born author (Daughters of Copper Woman), was also an accomplished screenwriter ( Dreamspeaker , Ticket to Heaven , Bomb Squad, The Tin Flute, A Matter of Choice, Homecoming and Drying Up The Streets) and a dutiful and doting mother and caretaker for three generations of children.

“I don’t think anyone has captured the idiom of the working-class, BC, coastal small community as well as she has,” says Howard White, Cameron’s long-time publisher, in a Tyee interview. “I sort of think of her as the William Faulkner of the BC coast.”

Anne Cameron’s audacious Daughters of Copper Woman (Press Gang, 1981) has been reprinted at least fifteen times and translated into numerous languages.

Anne Cameron is a “strong voice for the emancipation of women, regardless of their sexual preference,” said