Date of Birth: 
Place of Birth: Oshawa, Ontario, Canada
About Wayland Drew
- Wayland Drew (1932–1998) was a writer born in Oshawa, Ontario.
- He earned a BA in English Language and Literature from Victoria College at the University of Toronto in 1957, and began a teaching career in 1961 at the high school in Port Perry, Ontario.
- He later went on to teach in Bracebridge and Muskoka Lakes, in addition to stints at the Ontario Ministry of Education, before retiring in 1994.
- He married Gwendolyn Parrott in 1957; they had four children. Drew began to write seriously in high school and published a number of short stories (to magazines such as The Tamarack Review) and non-fiction pieces throughout his career, while also selling radio and film scripts.
- His first novel (and sometimes stated to be his best) was The Wabeno Feast (1973).
- While rooted in Northern Ontario, the story indicted modern industrial civilization as an extension of the European colonization of Canada by depicting an entire society's fall into ruin.
- In her essay on "Canadian Monsters: Some Aspects of the Supernatural in Canadian Fiction", Margaret Atwood noted that Drew's use of the aboriginal wabeno revealed a concern "with man's relationship to his society and to himself, as opposed to his relationship with the natural environment" and she concluded that Drew's novel combined "both concerns in a rather allegorical and very contemporary fashion". Many readers, though, surely know him better as the author of an ecological science fiction trilogy, the Erthring Cycle (1984-1986), and of several movie novelizations (Corvette Summer, Dragonslayer, *batteries not included, and Willow, the last three of which were translated into French and the second in German).
- His non-fiction also reflected his concern for the environment and interest for Canadian landscapes, as seen in books such as Superior: The Haunted Shore and A Sea Within: the Gulf of St.
- Lawrence.
- His ultimate novel, Halfway Man (1989), expanded on themes from his first.
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