Heather Spears received the Governor-General's Award for poetry in 1990 for The Word for Sand and has received the Pat Lowther Award three times, for How To Read Faces, The Word for Sand, and Required Reading: a witness in words and drawings to the Reena Virk Trials, 1998-2000. Born in Vancouver in 1934, she graduated from the Vancouver School of Art in 1953 and moved to Copenhagen in 1962. After her children grew up, Spears returned to Canada annually to conduct speaking and reading tours and to teach drawing and head-sculpting workshops.

Drawings from the Newborn combines her b&w drawings of premature and sick infants with her poems. Her collection of poetry, Human Acts, contains poems which won first prize in the 1990 CBC annual literary competition. Her science fiction novel Moonfall is set after a nuclear war and the collapse of the ozone layer. A new race of two-headed humans must turn to a freakish one-headed character to prevent 'moonfall', the impending collision of the moon and earth. The Flourish concerns Spears' rediscovered story of the bloody murder of her great aunt in Victorian Scotland. She published in total: eleven collections of poetry, five novels and three volumes of drawings.

Heather Spears died in Denmark on April 15, 2021.

BOOKS:

Asylum Poems, Emblem, 1958 (poetry)
The Danish Portraits, Ryerson, 1967 (poetry)
From the Inside, Fiddlehead, 1972 (poetry)
Drawings from the Newborn, Ben-Simon, 1986 (poetry, 52 drawings)
How to Read Faces, Wolsak and Wynn, 1988 (poetry)
The Word for Sand, Wolsak and Wynn, 1989 (poetry)
Drawn from the Fire, Children of the Intifada 1989 (drawings)
Massacre, Drawings from Jerusalem, 1990 (drawings)
Human Acts, Wolsak and Wynn, 1991 (poetry)
Moonfall, Beach Holme Publications, 1991 (fiction)
The Children of Atwar, Beach Holme 1993 (fiction)
The Taming, Tesseracts 1996 (fiction)
The Panum Poems, Ekstasis 1996 (drawings and poems)
Selected and New Poems, Wolsak and Wynn 1998 (poetry)
Required Reading: a witness in words and drawings to the Reena Virk Trials, 1998-2000, Wolsak and Wynn, 2000 (drawings and poems)
Line by Line, Ekstasis, 2002 (drawings of Canadian poets with their poems)
The Flourish, Ekstasis Editions, 2003 (documentary crime fiction, drawings)
I Can Still Draw (Wolsak and Wynn 2008) $17
The Creative Eye (2007, 2014)

[BCBW 2014] "Poetry" "Science"