The Essential Don Coles

Donald Coles was born in Woodstock, Ontario, Canada on April 12, 1927. He received a bachelor's degree in history and a master's in English from the University of Toronto. After graduating, he studied at Cambridge and spent most of the 1950s studying, writing, and working as a translator in Europe. He moved to Toronto in 1965 and taught in the humanities and creative writing programs at York University. He retired in 1995.

He wrote 14 volumes of poetry including The Prinzhorn Collection; Forests of the Medieval World, which won the Governor-General's literary award for poetry in 1993; and Kurgan, which won the Trillium Prize in 2000. He also wrote a novel entitled Doctor Bloom's Story. He died on November 29, 2017 at the age of 90.

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