Tim Lilburn was born in Regina, Saskatchewan. He has published nine books of poetry, including To the River (1999), Kill-site (2003), and Orphic Politics (2008). His work has received Canada’s Governor General’s Award (for Kill-site), the Saskatchewan Book of the Year Award, and the Canadian Authors Association Award among other prizes. A selection of his poetry is collected in Desire Never Leaves: The Poetry of Tim Lilburn (Wilfird Laurier University Press, 2007), edited by Alison Calder. Lilburn has produced two books of essays, both concerned with poetics, eros and politics, especially environmentalism: Living in the World As If It Were Home (1999) and Going Home (2008). He has also edited and contributed to two influential essay anthologies on poetics, namely Poetry and Knowing and Thinking and Singing: Poetry and the Practice of Philosophy.
He has written at length on Plato and thinkers in the Christian contemplative tradition, such as John Cassian and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, in the belief that a resuscitation of this tradition may have a decolonizing effect. Lilburn has been a writer-in-residence at the University of Western Ontario, the University of Alberta and St. Mary’s University, as well as the Regina Public Library, and now teaches in the Department of Writing at the University of Victoria. His work has been widely translated and anthologized. His most recent book is Assiniboia, an opera for chant in three parts, sections of which have been choreographed and performed by contemporary dance companies in Canada.
