About

David Day is one of B.C.'s most widely published authors. He grew up in Victoria, edited his high school newspaper, contributed sports articles to the Victoria Times and worked on Vancouver Island for five years as a logger. He travelled in Europe, staying mainly in Greece, where he wrote some of the poems that were included in his first that was mainly related to his logging days, The Cowichan (Oolichan, 1975; Harbour, 1976). Also near the outset of his literary career, David Day completed a non-fiction assignment for the Provincial Archives called Men of the Forest (1977) and he co-edited Many Voices: An Anthology of Contemporary Canadian Indian Poetry (J.J. Douglas, 1977) with Marilyn Bowering. British Columbians represented were George Lezard of the Okanagan, Mary Augusta Tappage of the Cariboo, George Clutesi, Eleanor Crowe of Summerland, Sarain Stump, Gordon Williams of Vernon, Skyros Bruce, Benjamin Abel of Westbank, Edward John of Fort St. James and Jeannette Armstrong Bonneau of Penticton.

David Day has since achieved sales of several million books with ecological titles such as The Doomsday Book of Animals (Toronto: Wiley, 1981), The Whale War (D&M, 1987) and Eco Wars; plus titles from his fairy tale imagination such as The Tolkien Bestiary (Harbour, 1978), The Hobbit Companion (2000), Tolkien: The Illustrated Encyclopedia (2000), The Tolkien Companion (Mandarin-Mitchell-Beasley, 1993) and Tolkien's Ring (Harper-Collins, 1994). Even though Day has published numerous successful books pertaining to the writings of Tolkien, he didn't read Lord of the Rings until his late teens. Reprinted dozens of times in dozens of countries, The Tolkien Bestiary is one of the bestselling books ever first published from B.C. He got the idea for an encyclopedia of an imaginary world while taking a bibliography course at UBC.

The Eco Wars: True Tales of Environmental Madness (Key Porter, 1989) is an encyclopedia of ecological activism. It cites the deaths of Chico Mendes (murdered, Brazil, 1988), Dian Fossey (murdered, Rwanda, 1985), Fernando Pereira (murdered, New Zealand, 1985), Hilda Murrell (murdered, England, 1984), Valery Rinchinov (murdered, USSR, 1981), Joy Adamson (murdered, Kenya, 1980), Karen Silkwood (murdered? USA, 1974) and Guy Bradley (murdered, USA, 1905). Other environmental titles include The Encyclopedia of Vanished Species (Gallery Books, 1989), Noah's Choice: True Stories of Extinction and Survival (Penguin, 1990), The Green Booklist (Viking-Penguin, 1992) and The Complete Rhinoceros (Environmental Investigation Agency Press, 1994).

Day's numerous children’s books are published worldwide. Illustrated by Eric Beddows, Day's first children's book, The Emperor's Panda (McClelland & Stewart, 1986), is the story of the first panda the world has ever seen and a shepherd boy named Kung in a land called Sung Wu. Illustrated by Richard Evans, his children's picture book The Swan Children (Doubleday, 1989) is based on an Irish folk tale about an embittered queen who transforms four stepchildren into swans for 1,000 years, until they are liberated by tolling of church bells. Realizing the age of magic has ended, the swans return to an underwater kingdom. "What interested me," Day said, "was the confrontation between the pagan world and the Christian one... with the result that the pagan world went underground but still existed. For young readers he has has also published The Sleeper (Doubleday, 1990), The Walking Catfish / or The Big Lie (Macmillan, 1992 or Piccadilly, 1991), Aska's Animals (Doubleday, 1991), Aska's Birds (Doubleday, 1992) Tippu (Piccadilly Press, 1993), King of the Woods (Little Brown, 1993), Aska's Sea Creatures (Doubleday, 1994).

Day has lived in Toronto, London and Victoria. Other David Day titles include The Burroughs Bestiary (London: New English Library, 1978), Castles (McGraw-Hill, 1984) and The Search for Arthur (D'Agostini, 1995), plus three more volumes of poetry: The Scarlet Coat Serial (Press Porcépic, 1981), The Animals Within (Penumbra, 1984) and Gothic (Exile, 1986). Early in his career David Day wrote a weekly column for Punch in England. The Whale War was the basis for a BBC television film of the same name. Eco Wars was published in the United States as The Environmental Wars. The Emperor's Panda was adapted and performed by the Young People's Theatre of Toronto. Gothic was adapted as a stage performance by magician Simon Drak at the Royal Victoria Museum's Magic, Shamanism and Poetry Festival in 1987.