Person

McConnell, William

1917-2001

William C. McConnell was born on February 12, 1917, in Vancouver, one of six children. He served as a Seargent in the Canadian Armed Forces during the second World War, and he was in one of the first cohorts to pass through UBC’s Law School post-war. He graduated and began practicing in 1949. He continued to practice law full time from 1949 until retirement in 1983; during his career, worked mostly as a barrister as was by all accounts highly successful and well respected in his field.

McConnell married first wife Alice in the early 1940s. Alice passed away after a long illness in 1981, and McConnell remarried many years later. Alice was a writer, and McConnell likewise was a respected and well-known writer of short stories. In addition to his full-time law career, McConnell assisted in establishing the journal Canadian Literature and the creative writing magazine Prism International. He founded Klanak Press in 1958 and served as its general editor until the mid-1970s.

McConnell was introduced to Malcolm Lowry by mutual friend Earle Birney sometime during Lowry’s Dollarton years. They remained friends for at least as long as Lowry was in Vancouver; Lowry relied on McConnell’s law expertise when working on October Ferry to Gabriola, as evidenced by McConnell’s name appearing on the frontispiece of at least the 1970 edition of that book in thanks for his help (“I wish to express my thanks to William C. McConnell, barrister, solicitor, and friend, for his help in all the legal matters in this book. M.L.“). He remained an admirer of Lowry’s writing, and he was invited to present at the 1997 Malcolm Lowry Conference in 1997 at the University of Toronto. McConnell passed away on December 6, 2001, in Vancouver.

Description updated by Malcolm Fish, 17 October 2023.