By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Canadian author Farley Mowat, a master storyteller and tireless defender of nature and wildlife, has died. He was 92.
Stephen Smith, a friend of Mowat’s, said he died on Tuesday evening after collapsing at his house in Port Hope, Ontario. Smith said he couldn’t confirm a cause of death, adding a family statement will be issued.
Mowat wrote some 40 books, many based on his own adventures and travels. Among his best-known works are Never Cry Wolf, a fictional narrative about Mowat living among wolves in sub-arctic Canada, Lost in the Barrens, which follows a Cree Indian boy and a Canadian orphan’s adventures in the Arctic.
He said he was lucky to be able to combine his two passions: writing and nature, calling the latter ‘the only subject I really want to write about’.
Acclaimed Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood tweeted that Mowat was a ‘wonderful colleague & friend of many years’.
From the age of 13, Mowat was fiercely dedicated to writing about the natural world.
As a young teen he started a magazine called Nature Lore and had a column in the Saskatoon Star Phoenix.
Mowat was born in Belleville, Ontario, on May 12, 1921. The son of a librarian, he grew up in Windsor, Ontario, and Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.
His novels and other non-fiction works have been translated into more than 20 languages.
The award-winning author wrote Never Cry Wolf, a fictional narrative about Mowat living among wolves in sub-arctic Canada and Lost in the Barrens, which follows a Cree Indian boy and a Canadian orphan’s adventures in the Arctic
Never one to shy away from controversy, Mowat was outspoken about many environmental and social issues.
He called Canada’s treatment of aboriginals ‘abominable,’ said Canada’s annual seal hunt was, ‘perhaps the most atrocious single trespass by human beings against the living world that’s taking place today,’ and said hunts in general were ‘symbolic of the massive destruction that we’ve visited upon life’.
He was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Jubilee Medal in 1956, the Governor General’s Award for Lost in the Barrens in 1956, the Leacock Medal for Humor for he Boat Who Wouldn’t Float in 1970, the Order of Canada in 1981 and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Fund for Animal Welfare in 2003.