Yukon who is who

Al Pope

Al Pope was born in Scotland and came to Canada at the age of twelve. He grew up in southern Ontario and moved to the Yukon when he was twenty-one. He started dog sledding and won two provincial championships with a team he raised. He built a cabin for his family thirty miles south of Whitehorse.¹⁾

Pope is a Yukon author, journalist, and farmer. He studied creative writing at Sage Hill, and the Banff Centre.²⁾ He produced a regular column for the Yukon News from 1994 to 2014.³⁾ Pope’s first novel, Bad Latitudes, was warmly reviewed and was nominated for a ReLit Award. He won the Ma Murray Award for Best Columnist in British Columbia and Yukon in 2002, 2010, and 2014 for his weekly Yukon News column, Nordicity. He won the George Cadogan Memorial Outstanding Columnist Award in in 2013 and 2014. Pope but continues to write for himself and other publications. His plays and stories have aired on CBC Radio and his radio play, Thin Ice, went to become a dance theatre work.⁴⁾ In 2019, Pope produced a new book, The Boreal Curmudgeon: Twenty Years of Nordicity.⁵⁾