William Patrick Kinsella was born in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada on May 25, 1935. He received a bachelor of arts degree in creative writing at the University of Victoria in 1974 and a master of fine arts degree in English at the University of Iowa in 1978. Before becoming a full-time author, he was a professor of English at the University of Calgary.
During his lifetime, he wrote approximately 30 books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. His first collection of baseball stories, Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa, was published in 1980. In 1982, Kinsella expanded the stories into the novel Shoeless Joe, which was adapted into the 1989 movie Field of Dreams starring Kevin Costner and Ray Liotta. Shoeless Joe won the Canadian Authors Association Prize, the Alberta Achievement Award, the Books in Canada First Novel Award, and the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship.
His other novels included The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, The Further Adventures of Slugger McBatt, The Alligator Report, The Miss Hobbema Pageant, Magic Time, If Wishes Were Horses, Butterfly Winter, and Russian Dolls. He was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1993. He received the Order of British Columbia in 2005 and the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009. He died of a doctor-assisted death on September 16, 2016 at the age of 81.
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