He did start writing again and his literary agency said in a statement that Kinsella’s final work of fiction, Russian Dolls, will be published next year. “He would tell writing students that to become a writer, you don’t sit around and talk about writing, you don’t sit around and think about writing, you sit down and write,” Steele said.

Steele said Kinsella lost his “creative impulse to write” as a result of the accident, contributing to a 13-year break between his published novels before Butterfly Winter was released in 2011.ĭespite the hiatus, Steele said he was amazed while working on the biography to discover the sheer volume of writing Kinsella produced, at times writing more than a thousand of pages of manuscript in a single year. Three years after the accident, he said he had no interest in writing fiction and was spending his days playing Scrabble on the Internet. Kinsella suffered a head injury when he was in a car accident in 1997. Steele said Kinsella told him: “I’m a storyteller and my greatest satisfaction comes from making people laugh and also leaving them with a tear in the corner of their eye.”

In the week leading up to his death, Steele said he had the opportunity to ask Kinsella what his legacy was an author. The agency did not provide details but Willie Steele, who has been working on a biography of the writer, said Kinsella struggled with health complications due to diabetes for a number of years. His literary agency confirms the writer had a doctor-assisted death on Friday in Hope, B.C. Kinsella, the B.C.-based author of Shoeless Joe, the award-winning novel that became the film Field of Dreams, has died at 81.

Shoeless joe kinsella