Kildare Dobbs

Kildare Dobbs was born in Merrut, India, and educated at St Columba's College, Rathfarnum, Ireland, and Jesus College, Cambridge. During the Second World War he served in the Royal Navy, first as an able seaman and later as a sub-lieutenant, before going into the commandos. After the war he took a teaching diploma at London University before going in 1947 to what was then Tanganyika, where he served as a magistrate. He taught high school in Venice, Ontario, after immigrating to Canada in 1952. Thereafter he worked in Toronto as a book editor for nearly ten years with the Macmillan Company. It was at this time that he began writing and broadcasting radio scripts for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. These ranged from short talks and reviews to an impressive exploration of Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Through the 1960s and 1970s, he was a regular contributor to the CBC's literary program Anthology, produced for most of that time by Robert Weaver with whom, in 1956 Dobbs became one of the founding editors of the influential Tamarack Review. From 1965 to 1967 he served as managing editor of Saturday Night magazine. In 1968 he became a literary columnist for the Toronto Star. Now a free-lance journalist, he is particularly known as a travel writer.