W.P. Kinsella, B.C.-based author of ‘Shoeless Joe,’ has doctor-assisted death

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.

His best-known was “Shoeless Joe,” a 1982 magic-realist novel about a farmer who hears a voice telling him to build a baseball field. It was adapted into the Oscar-nominated Kevin Costner movie with the immortal line: “If you build it, he will come.”

Baseball 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.

“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.

Steele said Kinsella often wished he had written “Shoeless Joe” later, “so that way people would have read some of his other works first.”

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.

Kinsella suffered a head injury when he was in a car accident in 1997. Three years after the accident, he said he had no interest in writing fiction and was spending his days playing Scrabble on the Internet.

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.

Despite 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.

“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.

His literary agency said in a statement that Kinsella’s final work of fiction, “Russian Dolls,” will be published next year.

Kinsella’s agent Carolyn Swayze issued a statement on Friday saying he was “a unique, creative and outrageously opinionated man.”

Swayze said Kinsella persuaded her to become a literary agent in 1994 to represent his work.

“He was a dedicated story teller, performer, curmudgeon and irascible and difficult man,” her statement said.

His fiction made people laugh and cry, she added.

“Not a week has passed in the last 22 years, without (me) receiving a note of appreciation for Bill’s stories. His contribution will endure.”

Kinsella was born in Edmonton in 1935.

He began writing very early in life, winning a YMCA contest at the age of 14.

He took writing courses at the University of Victoria and earned a bachelor of arts in creative writing in 1974 and went on to complete a master of fine arts in English through the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa.

Before becoming a professional author, Kinsella was a professor of English at the University of Calgary.

He is survived by his two daughters, who the agency said cared for him in his final years, and several grandchildren.

The agency said he asked not to have a memorial service.

— with files from News1130

Laura Kane and Linda Givetash, The Canadian Press

by Canadian Press

W.P. Kinsella, B.C.-based author of ‘Shoeless Joe,’ has doctor-assisted death

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