Growing up, McWhirter spent winters in a kitchen house in West Belfast and summers in an asbestos bungalow, Carnalea, Co. Down. His story collection, The Gift of Women, which appeared from Exile Editions in 2014, opens with a story set in Carnalea, followed by one in Helen’s Bay. He first appeared in H.U. in a January/February issue, 1970. His anthologized prose ranges from The Blackstaff Book of Stories 2 to Stories of Pacific and Arctic Canada, Macmillan, and his poetry from The Penguin Book of Canadian Verse to Irish Writing in the Twentieth Century (Cork University Press). Most recently, his story, “Reef”, came out in Cli-fi, CANADIAN TALES OF CLIMATE CHANGE, Exile Editions, 2017. From 2007-2009, he served as Vancouver’s inaugural Poet Laureate and as laureate edited A Verse Map of Vancouver for Anvil Press. He is currently working on English translations of poetry by the Mexican poet, Homero Aridjis, for a bi-lingual book with New Directions, New York
