Lisa Robertson

Life and work

Born in Toronto, Ontario, Robertson moved to British Columbia in 1979, where she remained for twenty-three years. During her time there, she was a member of The Kootenay School of Writing, which is a writer-run collective, and Artspeak Gallery. From 1988 to 1994 she ran Proprioception Books, a bookstore in downtown Vancouver focusing on poetry, theory and criticism that also hosted readings. Her first book was a chapbook, The Apothecary, published by Tsunami Editions in 1991. Since then she has published eight books of poetry and two books of essays.

Robertson studied at Simon Fraser University (1984–1988), then left the university to become an independent bookseller (1988–1994). Since 1995 she has been a freelance writer and teacher. Her many essays on the contemporary visual arts, published in gallery and museum catalogues since the mid-1990s, are collected in her 2003 book Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture.

In 2006, Robertson was a judge of the Griffin Poetry Prize and Holloway poet-in-residence at UC Berkeley. From 2007 to 2010 she taught at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. In Fall 2010 she was writer-in-residence at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. In Spring 2014 she was the Bain Swigget lecturer in Poetry at Princeton University. In Spring 2017 she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters by Emily Carr University, in Vancouver, Canada.