Lynne Bowen is a mother of three who lives with her husband in
Nanaimo on Vancouver Island. After a short career as a public health nurse, she
began the study of history, receiving her Master of Arts degree in Western
Canadian History from the University of Victoria in 1980. Since then, she has
pieced together a career doing historical research, a radio column, oral
history, teaching adult education courses, writing videos, conducting coal
mining tours, preparing sign texts for heritage interpretive routes, writing
magazine articles and books, and teaching creative writing.
She is the author of two volumes of popular history about the coal miners of
Vancouver Island. Boss Whistle was published in 1982 and won the Eaton's
British
Columbia Book Award and the Canadian Historical Association's Regional
Certificate of Merit for British Columbia. Three Dollar Dreams was
published in 1987 and won the Lieutenant - Governors Medal for Writing British
Columbia History and was short-listed for the Roderick Hague-Brown Prize.
Her third book, Muddling Through: The Remarkable Story of the Barr
Colonists, was published in 1992 and won the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction prize and
the Canadian Historical Association Regional Certificate of Merit for the
Prairie Provinces and the Yukon. Her most recent book, Those Lake People,
Stories of Cowichan Lake, was published in 1995.
Lynne is the granddaughter of Barr Colonists Ivan and Bessie Crossley. Her
father, Desmond Crossley, was born and educated in Lloydminster. Her mother was
Muriel Holtby. The city and surrounding countryside still are home to many of
her relatives.
Lynne Bowen is the Maclean Hunter Lecturer in Creative Non-Fiction Writing at
the University of British Columbia. Her current project is a history of the
people of the oil patch. She hopes that she will be able to meet some of
Lloydminster’s oil pioneers in the course of her research.