Identity area
Type of entity
Person
Authorized form of name
Norton, Alden Albert
Parallel form(s) of name
- Alden Nowlan
Standardized form(s) of name according to other rules
Other form(s) of name
Identifiers for corporate bodies
Description area
Dates of existence
1933-1983
History
Alden Albert Knowlan was born in January 25, 1933 in Stanley, Nova Scotia. He was forced to leave school at age 10. At 14 he was working at a sawmill and by 16 he was walking or hitchhiking 30km to the county library where he began to pursue his lifelong passion for learning and reading. Nowlan’s early works expressed the life and lives he saw around him in rural Nova Scotia. He published many poetry books including The Rose and the Puritan (1958), Under the Ice (1961), The Things Which Are (1962) and the award-winning collection Bread, Wine and Salt (1967). He also wrote award-winning dramas — among them, A Gift to Last (1978) and Frankenstein (1981) — and fiction, The Wanton Troopers (1988) and Will Ye Let the Mummers In (1983), along with non-fiction celebrating Canadian landscapes.
He received Governor General’s Award for English Poetry in 1967 for Bread, Wine and Salt. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship the same year. In 1968, Nowlan became writer-in-residence at the University of New Brunswick and received a Canada Council Special Award. The University of Western Ontario awarded Nowlan the President’s Medal for short fiction in 1970 and again in 1972. The Canadian Authors Association awarded Nowlan their Silver Medal for Poetry in 1977. For his contribution to the arts, Alden Nowlan was given the Queen’s Silver Jubilee Medal in 1978. Alden Knowlan died June 27, 1983 in Fredericton, New Brunswick.