Author Biography: Murphy Orlando Shewchuk was born in Hamilton, Ontario, September 14, 1943. He received his primary education in a rural school in central Saskatchewan and he completed his secondary education in the mining town of Bralorne, British Columbia. After he graduated in 1961, he worked in the gold mines before he joined the RCAF where he completed his training in communications and in electronics.
His first magazine articles were of a technical nature and they appeared in Canadian ELECTRON in the mid-60s. While working at Shalalth, Shewchuk was a frequent contributor to Margaret Ma Murray's Bridge River-Lillooet News. In 1971, he moved to Kamloops and began writing a weekly Outdoor Scene Column for the Kamloops Daily Sentinal.
Shewchuk began writing books in 1973 with Exploring Kamloops Country, a backroads guide to the Kamloops region. In 1975 Hancock House published his second book, Fur, Gold and Opals. In 1980 he wrote the text for a 36-page special for Tourism British Columbia entitled Cariboo. His most recent book, Exploring the Nicola Valley, was published in 1981 by Douglas and McIntyre of Vancouver. In all of these, he wrote the text, created the maps and took all the photographs.
Shewchuk presently directs most of his writing energy to books and magazine articles which deal with the outdoors. He enjoys digging for historical points of interest and he has an active interest in the background of British Columbia's mining industry. |
