The Hugh MacLennan Memorial Lecture

 John Hugh MacLennan, internationally acclaimed Canadian author and five-time winner of the Governor General's Award for Fiction, was born in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, March 20, 1907. When he was 7 years old, his family moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia. MacLennan was ten years old and living in Halifax when the Imo and the French munitions ship the Mont Blanc collided in Halifax Harbour on December 6, 1917. The resulting explosion, known as the Halifax Explosion, was the greatest man-made explosion in human history prior to the atomic bomb, and his first published novel, Barometer Rising (1941), chronicles this event. His next novel and probably his most famous work, Two Solitudes (1945), was a best-seller in both Canada and the United States, and in 1946 won him the first of five Governor General's Awards. In 1951 Hugh MacLennan moved to Montreal and joined McGill University's Department of English, where he continued to write and publish, winning his last two Governor General's Awards for his collection of essays Thirty and Three (1954), and the novel The Watch That Ends the Night (1959). Montreal remained his home until he died on November 7, 1990.

The Hugh MacLennan Memorial Lecture series was established in 1992 with help of a 5-year grant from the M.E. Hart Foundation, and receives ongoing support from the Friends of the Library. John Metcalf delivered the first lecture in the series on October 21, 1992, in the Stephen Leacock Building.

McGill University's Rare Books and Special Collections is the repository of the Hugh MacLennan papers, which includes correspondence, two unpublished novels, the drafts of Two Solitudes and The Watch that Ends the Night, and many articles. Some of this material is available online through the Hugh MacLennan Virtual Library Project.