Randall Maggs
Randall Maggs was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, to a military family; he grew up playing hockey and served in the Royal Canadian Air Force. A resident of Newfoundland, he was a professor of literature at Sir Wilfred Grenfell College Corner Brook in Newfoundland, before his retirement. Maggs is the author of the poetry collections Timely Departures (1994) and Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems (2008), winner of the 2008 Winterset Award, the 2009 E.J. Pratt Poetry Prize, and the Kobzar Literary Award.
Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems is based on the life of ice hockey goalie Terry Sawchuk and depicts the world of ice hockey in the 1950s and 1960s. Maggs used a variety of narrators to tell Sawchuk’s story, which Barbara Carey, writing in the Toronto Star, called “a historical epic, complete with tragically flawed characters, high drama, gladiatorial combat and occasional comic relief.” Jamie Dopp, reviewing the collection for the Fiddlehead, observed that “the image pattern emphasizes that the work of trying to understand that a figure like Sawchuk is itself a ‘night work’—a work of the shadows, the hidden places, the unconscious.…”
Maggs has coedited two anthologies of Canadian and Irish poetry: However Blow the Winds: An Anthology of Poetry and Song from Ireland and Newfoundland and Labrador (2004) and The Echoing Years: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and Translation from Canada and Ireland (2008). He is artistic director of the March Hare Festival of Literature and Music and a woodworker.
Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems is based on the life of ice hockey goalie Terry Sawchuk and depicts the world of ice hockey in the 1950s and 1960s. Maggs used a variety of narrators to tell Sawchuk’s story, which Barbara Carey, writing in the Toronto Star, called “a historical epic, complete with tragically flawed characters, high drama, gladiatorial combat and occasional comic relief.” Jamie Dopp, reviewing the collection for the Fiddlehead, observed that “the image pattern emphasizes that the work of trying to understand that a figure like Sawchuk is itself a ‘night work’—a work of the shadows, the hidden places, the unconscious.…”
Maggs has coedited two anthologies of Canadian and Irish poetry: However Blow the Winds: An Anthology of Poetry and Song from Ireland and Newfoundland and Labrador (2004) and The Echoing Years: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and Translation from Canada and Ireland (2008). He is artistic director of the March Hare Festival of Literature and Music and a woodworker.