W.P. Kinsella, whose novel inspired the classic baseball film “Field of Dreams”, died Friday at age 81.
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“He was a dedicated story-teller, performer, curmudgeon, an irascible and hard man”, said Kris Rothstein, an associate agent at the Carolyn Swayze Literary Agency where Kinsella was a long-time client.
“A lot of other work has grown from his, and I think that’s important”, she said. “I wrote it 30 years ago, and the fact that people are still discovering it makes me proud”, Kinsella said when he received the award.
“One of North America’s most prolific and popular authors, he published nearly 30 books of fiction, nonfiction and poetry, which were translated into many languages around the world”.
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”.
Many of the Yale, B.C., writer’s books were about baseball, and in 2011, he won the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame Jack Graney award for his contributions to the game in Canada. When he does, Shoeless Joe Jackson and other baseball players of yesteryear come to play.
Kinsella told the Sun he loved taking stories in directions the reader does not expect, and magical realism runs through many of his stories and books.
In 1997, Kinsella was hit by a auto and suffered a head injury. Three years after the accident, he said he had no interest in writing fiction and was spending his days playing Scrabble on the Internet. He became a full-time writer after his stint at the university.
His final work, titled Russian Dolls, will be published by next year, according to his agent.
“He was a dedicated story-teller, performer, curmudgeon, an irascible and hard man”, Swayze said in a statement. She describes the book as a collection of linked stories about a struggling author and his muse, who tells him “dark, dangerously inconsistent stories of her past”.
His fiction made people laugh and cry, she added. Not a week has passed in the last 22 years, without receiving a note of appreciation for Bill’s stories.
Kinsella was born and raised in Edmonton, Alberta.
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Kinsella wrote more than 20 books, most famously Shoeless Joe.
