In 1967 he began teaching English and creative writing at U of Alberta.
Wiebe holds a bachelor of theology degree from the Mennonite Brethren Bible College, Winnipeg (1962), and for 18 months edited the Mennonite Brethren Herald. Wiebe has also published 4 volumes containing short stories, Where Is the Voice Coming From? (1974), Alberta/A Celebration (1979) and The Angel of the Tar Sands (1982), and River of Stone: Fiction and Memories (1995) a play, Far as the Eye Can See, written in collaboration with Theatre Passe Muraille (1977) a novella, The Mad Trapper (1980), based on the RCMP hunt for Albert Johnson, and, with Bob Beal, War in the West: Voices of the 1885 Rebellion (1985) and an illustrated collection of documents and memoirs Chinook Christmas (1992), a children's book outlining Christmas festivities in Southern Alberta and Playing Dead (1989), a collection of essays about the Canadian North. His 1994 novel, A Discovery of Strangers, about the first Franklin expedition, won him a second Governor General's Award for fiction. The novel My Lovely Enemy (1983) combines his interest in Mennonite and Indian subjects it is a daring, experimental book involving a radical theology of love.
Both books are based on detailed historical research, and each offers a sympathetic but not idealized portrait of a complex and controversial figure. The Scorched-Wood People (1977) is set in the same period and offers an interpretation of Louis RIEL from the viewpoint of the Métis. The Temptations of Big Bear (1973) is a long, intricate novel centred on a Plains Cree chief ( see BIG BEAR). In 1970, his first "epic" novel, The Blue Mountains of China, presented a saga of the Mennonite people dispersed yet enduring in Russia, Paraguay and Canada. It was followed by First and Vital Candle (1966), set in a Native community in northern Ontario and dealing didactically with moral and religious issues. On publication it caused bitter controversy among Mennonites. It is a powerful problem novel concerned with the split between pacifist principles and the urge to violence in the hero and in the congregation in which he lives during WWII. His first novel, Peace Shall Destroy Many (1962), set in a community similar to that in which he had grown up, began as an exercise for his MA. He attended high school in Coaldale, Alta, and later U of Alberta. Born in a small Low-German-speaking community in northern Saskatchewan 4 years after his parents emigrated from Russia, Wiebe was the youngest of 7 children and did not learn English until he went to school. Wiebe has written impressive novels not only about his own people, the MENNONITES, but about other minority ethnic groups living close to the land. Rudy Henry Wiebe, writer (b at Speedwell, near Fairholme, Sask ).
Rudy Wiebe won the Governor General's Award for fiction in 1994 (photo by Jorge Frascara).
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