George McWhirter is a Northern Irish-Canadian writer, translator, editor, teacher and Vancouver’s first Poet Laureate. The son of a shipyard worker, George McWhirter was raised in a large extended family on the Shankill Road in Belfast. He and his extended family spent the war years and then weekends and the summers at their seaside bungalow in Carnalea, now a suburb of Bangor, County Down. In 1957 he began a "combined scholarship" studying English and Spanish at Queen’s University, Belfast, and education at Stranmillis College, Belfast
