Steele added that he hopes more people pick up Kinsella’s many books, especially those containing his fictional short stories about aboriginal characters on a real-life central Alberta reserve which was then called Hobbema but is now called Maskwacis. Steele said Kinsella often wished he had written Shoeless Joe later, “so that way people would have read some of his other works first.” “His work has touched the lives of thousands of baseball fans across Canada and around the world,” said Scott Crawford, director of the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame. His 1982 magic-realist novel Shoeless Joe, about a farmer who hears a voice telling him to build a baseball field, was adapted into the popular Kevin Costner film Field of Dreams with the immortal line: “If you build it, he will come.”īaseball was one of Kinsella’s passions, and it provided the setting for many of his other works, including The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, Box Socials and Ichiro Dreams: Ichiro Suzuki and the Seattle Mariners, a biography published only in Japan. Kinsella published almost 30 books of fiction, non-fiction and poetry, and was a winner of the Order of Canada and the Order of British Columbia.
He did start writing again and his literary agency said in a statement that Kinsella’s final work of fiction, Russian Dolls, will be published next year. “He would tell writing students that to become a writer, you don’t sit around and talk about writing, you don’t sit around and think about writing, you sit down and write,” Steele said. Steele said Kinsella lost his “creative impulse to write” as a result of the accident, contributing to a 13-year break between his published novels before Butterfly Winter was released in 2011.ĭespite the hiatus, Steele said he was amazed while working on the biography to discover the sheer volume of writing Kinsella produced, at times writing more than a thousand of pages of manuscript in a single year. Three years after the accident, he said he had no interest in writing fiction and was spending his days playing Scrabble on the Internet. Kinsella suffered a head injury when he was in a car accident in 1997.
Steele said Kinsella told him: “I’m a storyteller and my greatest satisfaction comes from making people laugh and also leaving them with a tear in the corner of their eye.” In the week leading up to his death, Steele said he had the opportunity to ask Kinsella what his legacy was an author. The agency did not provide details but Willie Steele, who has been working on a biography of the writer, said Kinsella struggled with health complications due to diabetes for a number of years. His literary agency confirms the writer had a doctor-assisted death on Friday in Hope, B.C. Kinsella, the B.C.-based author of Shoeless Joe, the award-winning novel that became the film Field of Dreams, has died at 81.
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