Fred Wah has been appointed Canada's parliamentary poet laureate. Born in Swift Current, Saskatchewan on January 23, 1939, he grew up in the West Kootenays. He is the son of a Canadian-born Chinese-Scots-Irish father raised in China and a Swedish-born Canadian mother from Swift Current. In the early 1950s, his family operated the newest and most modern Chinese cafe in Nelson, the Diamond Grill, subject of one of his more than twenty books.

[BCBW 2012]