Betty Lambert was a Canadian writer with a distinctive voice that spoke through her seventy-five diverse plays and her only novel, Crossings, in a way that once heard could not be easily forgotten. She was once called by a reviewer the “Margaret Laurence of Vancouver” but of course she was really the Betty Lambert of Vancouver. Her vision was her own.

Betty was born in Calgary in 1933. She was from a working-class prairie family and, growing up during the depression, she became aware of social injustices early. She decided as a child that she wanted to be a writer and sold her first poem at thirteen for two dollars. She wrote, “My father died when I was twelve and I was no longer working class, I was welfare class, and I was determined to get out of that class. Writing was a way out but soon it became more than that, it became a necessity.”

Read the full biography about Betty, written by her sister, Dorothy Beavington.

Read Betty Lambert’s Wikipedia page.