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Roy Miki (1942 – 2024)

Japanese Canadian author and poet, Roy Miki, has died.

October 15th, 2024

Roy Miki was a professor at SFU's English Department from 1970s until 2007.

Miki was the recipient of a Governor General’s Award for Poetry, the Order of Canada, the Order of British Columbia, a Gandhi Peace Award and many more accolades during his lifetime. Read more about Miki’s achievements and bodies of work here.


Vancouver-based author, poet, activist and Japanese Canadian World War II internee, Roy Miki died on October 5, 2024.

Roy Miki taught in the English department at Simon Fraser University for over thirty years and was instrumental in the achievement of Japanese Canadian Redress. His 2004 book, Redress: Inside the Japanese Canadian Call for Justice (Raincoast) offers an account of that arduous process.

Roy and Slavia Miki at the BC Book Prizes (2015). Photo courtesy Vancouver Courier

Roy Miki received his PhD from UBC in 1981, and he had joined the English Department at SFU in the 1970s, where he taught until his retirement in 2007. There, he played a pivotal role in establishing Asian Canadian literature courses as a field. Roy wrote and edited many critical studies, literary essays and books of poetry. His collection, Surrender (Mercury Press) received the Governor General’s Award for Poetry in 2001.

In recent years, Roy Miki co-wrote with his wife, Slavia Miki, two award-winning children’s books, Dolphin SOS (Tradewind, 2014) and Peggy’s Impossible Tale (Tradewind, 2021).

He received the Order of Canada in 2006 and the Order of British Columbia in 2009, the 20th Annual Gandhi Peace Award, an honorary Doctor of Divinity, the Thakore Visiting Scholar Award, and the Sterling Prize in Support of Controversy. In 2007, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

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Full entry

Few Canadian writers have been more successful in both literature and politics than Roy Miki, a sansei, or third-generation Japanese Canadian. Working with his brother Art, the leader of the Japanese Canadian redress movement, Roy Miki played a key role in obtaining financial compensation from the federal government for camp internees and their families. Roy Miki’s 2004 book, Redress: Inside the Japanese Canadian Call for Justice (Raincoast, 2004) has chronicled those events. He has subsequently received an unprecedented string of honours during the 2006-2007 period, making him one of the respected professors and writers in British Columbia.

In 2002 he won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry for his collection called Surrender (Mercury Press, 2001), which challenges the official history relating to the internment of Japanese-Canadians in the 1940s. Two years later Miki chronicled the long and ultimately successful fight for compensation in Redress. It includes Miki’s personal and family histories as an examination of race and (in)tolerance in Canada. “I always felt the dichotomy between our pre-internment and post-internment lives,” he told the Simon Fraser University News in 2005. “There was the mythical and glorious world of the Fraser Valley with its great weather and landscape that my parents told me about, and then there was this God-forsaken place called Manitoba. I always had a feeling of having been sent into exile.”

One year later, on October 2, 2006, Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday, Miki received the 20th annual Gandhi Peace Award and the 16th annual Thakore Visiting Scholar award for his commitment to Mahatma Gandhi’s ideals of truth, justice, human rights and non-violence in regards to his his long and outstanding achievements related to redress. This award was created in 1991 by former SFU faculty member Natverlal Thakore to recognize those who have displayed a consistent concern for truth, justice and non-violence. In the same year Miki received the 2006 Nora and Ted Sterling Prize in Support of Controversy, and he was admitted to the Order of Canada for his contributions to community and the arts.

Roy Miki as a boy with his father Kazuo. Photo courtesy of Roy Miki

Roy Miki was born October 10, 1942, six months after his parents were uprooted and shipped from Haney to a sugar beet farm in Ste. Agathe, Manitoba. After growing up in Winnipeg and attending university, Roy Miki and his older brother Art went to live in Japan where he discovered he felt more Canadian than anything else. Upon his return to Canada in the 1970s, he met individuals such as Rick Shiomi and Randy Enomoto who were increasingly concerned with the need for redress.

Roy Miki and Art Miki were at the forefront of the successful Redress Movement which Roy Miki has chronicled with Cassandra Kobayashi in Justice in Our Time: The Japanese Canadian Redress Settlement (Talonbooks, 1991). The movement led by the National Association of Japanese Canadians was complicated by the interventions of a faction led by George Imai of Toronto who did not believe individual compensation would be possible. The Japanese Canadian community of Canada galvanized their support for the NAJC in response, electing Art Miki to the position of president in 1984. In that year the NAJC successfully pressured Conservative leader Brian Mulroney to make a campaign promise to negotitate a redress settlement. The NAJC had already presented Prime Minister Trudeau with an accounting of cumulative losses prepared by the Vancouver office of Price-Waterhouse, estimated at not less than $443 million in 1986 dollars. With the Miki family at the forefront of the NAJC’s efforts, individual redress was achieved in 1988.

Roy Miki, editor, Pacific Windows Collected Poems of Roy K. Kiyooka (Talonbooks, 1997)

As a longtime professor of English at Simon Fraser University, Roy Miki is the author of an extensive 320-page annotated bibliography of George Bowering that won the Gabriel Roy award from the Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures as the best book on Canadian Literature for 1991. He has also edited two books about the work of poet bpNichol; Tracing the Paths (Talonbooks, 1988) and Meanwhile: The Critical Writings of bpNichol (Talonbooks, 2002); plus Pacific Windows: Collected Poems of Roy K. Kiyooka (Talonbooks, 1997), winner of the 1997 Poetry Award from the Association of Asian American Studies. As a social activist and historian, he has edited This Is My Own: Letters to Wes and other Writings on Japanese Canadians, 1941-1948 (Talonbooks, 1985) by Muriel Kitagawa. As well, Miki is a musician, poet and editor of West Coast Line: A Journal of Contemporary Writing and its Modernist Sources. His other titles include Random Access File (Red Deer College Press, 1995), Saving Face: Poems Selected 1976-1988 (Turnstone, 1991), There (New Star, 2006) and Broken Entries: Race. Subjectivity. Writing. Essays (Mercury, 1998). The essays in Broken Entries reflect his participation in the redress movement from the late 1980s to 1997.

Miki received a 1997 poetry award from the Association of Asian American Studies. His fifth poetry collection, Mannequin Rising (New Star, 2011), according to the publisher, “describes a world of consumerism, and answers the visual cacophony of commodities and window displays with a series of poems and photomontages that reflect the uncanny juxtapositioning he sees all around him.” Miki observes mannequins in shopping areas of Kitsilano, Granville Island and Tokyo.

Roy Miki appeared on the BC Bestsellers List in October of 2014 after he contributed text for a children’s book, Dolphin SOS (Tradewind, 2014), co-authored with his wife Slavia Miki and illustrated by Julie Flett. Based on true events, Dolphin SOS recounts the story of three dolphins trapped in an ice-covered cove on the coast of Newfoundland. After the government fails to provide assistance, some young boys take matters into their own hands in order to save the distressed dolphins. The book received the Christie Harris Illustrated BC Book Prize in April of 2015.

In 2021 Roy Miki and Slavia Miki co-authored the children’s title, Peggy’s Impossible Tale (Tradewind), illustrated by Mariko Ando, which won the Chocolate Lily Award in 2023.

Roy Miki died in Vancouver on October 5, 2024.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:

This Is My Own: Letters to Wes and Other Writings on Japanese Canadians (Talonbooks, 1985) $24.95 ISBN 0-88922-230-4

Tracing the Paths: Reading’ Writing The Martyrology (Talonbooks, 1988) $24.95 ISBN 0-88922-256-8

A Record of Writing: An Annotated and Illustrated Bibliography of George Bowering (Talonbooks, 1990) $29.95 ISBN 0-88922-263-0

Saving Face: Poems Selected 1976-1988 (Turnstone, 1991)

Justice In Our Time: The Japanese Canadian Redress Settlement (Talonbooks, 1991) $29.95 ISBN 0-88922-292-4. Co-edited with Cassandra Kobayashi

Random Access File (Red Deer College Press, 1995)

Pacific Windows: Collected Poems of Roy Kiyooka (Talonbooks, 1997) $29.95 ISBN 0-88922-378-5. Editor.

Broken Entries: Race. Subjectivity. Writing. Essays (Mercury, 1998) $19.95 ISBN 1-55128-059-0

Surrender (Mercury Press, 2001) $15.95 ISBN 1-55128-095-7

Meanwhile: The Critical Writings of bpNichol (Talonbooks, 2002) $24.95 ISBN 0-88922-447-1

Redress: Inside the Japanese Canadian Call for Justice (Raincoast, 2004) $34.95 ISBN 1-55192-650-4

There (New Star, 2006) $18.00 ISBN 978-1-55420-026-9

Trans.Can.Lit: Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2006)

Reshaping Memory Owning History: Through the Lens of Japanese Canadian Redress (Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 2009), with Yuko Shibata and Michiko Ayukawa

Mannequin Rising (New Star Books, 2011). Miki’s fifth collection of poetry. 978-1-55420-056-6

Dolphin SOS (Tradewind, 2014) with Slavia Miki. Illustrations by Julie Flett $17.95 9781896580760

Flow (Talonbooks, 2019) $29.95 978-1-77201-217-0

Peggy’s Impossible Tale (Tradewind, 2021) with Slavia Miki. Illustrations by Mariko Ando $19.95 ‎ 978-1926890210

INSPIRED BY ROY MIKI

Tracing the Lines: Reflections on Contemporary Poetics and Cultural Politics in Honour of Roy Miki (Talonbooks 2013, $24.95) Edited by Maia Joseph, Christine Kim, Chris Lee, and Larissa Lai. 978-0-88922-694-4

One Response to “Roy Miki (1942 – 2024)”

  1. David Stouck says:

    This is a splendid account of my late colleague Roy Miki. Roy was a fine poet and an honourable man who always pursued the truth. His shyness was often deceiving. I know he would have appreciated this notice of his life.

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