The University of Victoria is now home to the archives of Edith Iglauer, one of the most observant and adventurous journalist/writers to work in Canada.
Iglauer, a longtime Pender Harbour resident who died on Feb. 13 just weeks shy of her 102nd birthday, was a U.S. war correspondent during the Second World War and a staff writer for the New Yorker. A 1961 assignment to what is now Nunavut to write about the Inuit was her first introduction to Canada.
On an assignment to write about West Coast salmon fishing, Iglauer met B.C. fisherman John Daly, whom she would later marry and immortalize after his death in Fishing with John. In another Canadian book, Denison’s Ice Road, she wrote of moving freight in the Arctic.
When Iglauer died of pneumonia, she had spent much of her life in Garden Bay on the Sunshine Coast.
Her family agreed to donate her archives to UVic, where they will form part of the library’s Special Collections and University Archives.
The items include notes from her New Yorker stories, correspondence, cassette tapes of interviews, and files on Pierre Trudeau that include photographs, letters and notes from his 1969 dinner at Iglauer’s apartment.
