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William Patrick Kinsella, OC, OBC (born May 25, 1935) is a Canadian novelist and short story writer. His work has often concerned baseball and Canada's First Nations and other Canadian issues.

Though born in Edmonton, Alberta, Kinsella was raised until he was 10 years-old at a homestead near Darwell, Alberta, 60 km west of the city, home-schooled by his mother and taking correspondence courses. "I'm one of these people who woke up at age five knowing how to read and write," he says.^[1] When he was ten, the family moved to Edmonton.

As an adult, he held a variety of jobs in Edmonton, including as a clerk for the Government of Alberta and managing a credit bureau. In 1967, he moved to Victoria, British Columbia, running a pizza restaurant called Caesar's Italian Village and driving a taxi.

Though he had been writing since he was a child (winning a YMCA contest at age 14), he began taking writing courses at the University of Victoria in 1970, receiving his Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing there in 1974. He traveled down to Iowa and earned a Master of Fine Arts in English degree through the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1978. In 1991 he was presented with an honorary Doctor of Literature degree from the University of Victoria.

Kinsella's most famous work is Shoeless Joe, upon which the movie Field of Dreams was based. A short story by Kinsella, "Lieberman in Love", was the basis for a short film that won the Academy Award for Live Action Short Film – the Oscar win came as a surprise to the author, who, watching the award telecast from home, had no idea the film had been made and released. He had not been listed in the film's credits, and was not acknowledged by director Christine Lahti in her acceptance speech – a full-page advertisement was later placed in Variety apologizing to Kinsella for the error. Kinsella's 8 books of short stories about life on a First Nations reserve were the basis for the movie Dance Me Outside and CBC television series The Rez, both of which Kinsella considers very poor quality. The collection Fencepost Chronicles won the Stepher Leacock Award for Humor in 1987.

Before becoming a professional author he was a professor of English at the University of Calgary in Alberta. Kinsella suffered a car accident in 1997 which resulted in the end of his fiction writing career. He is a noted tournament Scrabble player, becoming more involved with the game after being disillusioned by the 1994 Major League Baseball strike. He currently lives in Yale, British Columbia with his fourth wife, Barbara, and occasionally writes articles for various newspapers.

In the year 1993, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. In 2005, he was awarded the Order of British Columbia.

A paperback edition of Shoeless Joe (1982), Kinsella's most famous work.

• Dance Me Outside - 1977 (Movie adaptation: Dance Me Outside, 1994)
• Scars - 1978
• Shoeless Joe Jackson Goes To Iowa - 1980
• Born Indian - 1981
• Shoeless Joe - 1982 (winner of the 1983 Books in Canada First Novel Award and the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship)
• Moccasin Telegraph - 1983
• The Thrill of the Grass - 1984
• The Last Pennant Before Armageddon - 1984
• The Alligator Report - 1985
• Five Stories - 1985
• The Iowa Baseball Confederacy - 1986
• The Fencepost Chronicles - 1986 (winner of the 1987 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour)
• Red Wolf, Red Wolf - 1987
• The Further Adventures of Slugger McBatt - 1988 (U.S. title: Go the Distance)
• The Miss Hobbema Pageant - 1989
• Box Socials - 1991
• The Dixon Cornbelt League and Other Baseball Stories - 1993
• Brother Frank's Gospel Hour - 1994
• The Winter Helen Dropped By - 1995
• If Wishes Were Horses - 1996
• Magic Time - 1998
• The Secret of the Northern Lights - 1998
• Baseball Fantastic - 2000
• Japanese Baseball and Other Stories - 2000

1. ^ BC Bookword Author Bank, http://www.abcbookworld.com/?state=view_author&author_id=2671

• An annotated bibliography of his writings on baseball
• Article on Kinsella's 1997 accident
• Notable Writers among Iowa Alumni
• Kinsella gives award money to his Alma Mater
• W. P. Kinsella at the Internet Movie Database