William Patrick Kinsella OC OBC (May 25, 1935 – September 16, 2016) was a Canadian novelist and short story writer, known for his novel Shoeless Joe (1982), which was adapted into the movie Field of Dreams in 1989.

[1] He was raised until he was 10 years old at a homestead near Darwell, Alberta, 60 kilometres (37 mi) west of the city, home-schooled by his mother and taking correspondence courses.

"[4] Kinsella's literary education in his formative years came from reading and by attending all the plays at high school and any theatrical productions that made it to Edmonton.

His first published book was Dance Me Outside (1977), a collection of 17 short stories narrated by a young Cree, Silas Ermineskin, who describes life on a First Nations reserve in Kinsella's native Alberta.

"[7] Kinsella said after a heated public exchange with Rudy Wiebe on the topic, "Fiction writers can write about anything they damn well please,"[8] and that he considered the term "cultural appropriation" the nonsense of Eastern Canadian academics.

Shoeless Joe (1982), his first novel, blends fantasy and magic realism to tell the story of a poor Iowa farmer who, yielding to voices in his head, builds a baseball field in his cornfield that attracts the spirits of the 1919 Chicago White Sox.

Box Socials (1991), an evocation of life in rural Alberta during the Great Depression and World War II, has a growing boy as its narrator and recounts a local batting hero's hopes of facing a visiting major league pitcher 60 miles away in Edmonton.

Kinsella, who had never met him, created a wholly imagined character (aside from his reclusiveness) based on The Catcher in the Rye, a book that had great meaning to him as a young man.

"[11] In an example of metafiction, he named Shoeless Joe's protagonist Ray Kinsella, a character from Salinger's uncollected story "A Young Girl in 1941 with No Waist at All".

[4] Shoeless Joe won Kinsella the prestigious Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship and the Books in Canada First Novel Award in 1982.

[citation needed] W. P. Kinsella's novel Shoeless Joe was made into the movie Field of Dreams, starring Kevin Costner.

[14] Kinsella also felt that he was a victim of changes in the book industry during this period, saying in a 2010 interview with Maclean's Magazine, "I couldn't break into the market today if I was just starting out.

"[4] On September 1, 2011, Winnipeg, Manitoba's Enfield and Wizenty, a small press specializing in limited-edition hardcover books, released Kinsella's first published work in 13 years, Butterfly Winter.

[citation needed] A noted tournament Scrabble player, Kinsella became more involved with the game after being disillusioned by the 1994 Major League Baseball strike.