Robin Skelton, born in Yorkshire, England in 1925 and emigrated to Victoria, British Columbia in 1963, was a distinguished poet, author and literary critic. He founded the department of creative writing at the University of Victoria and worked there as a professor until his death on August 22, 1997 at the age of 71.
By any standard he was prolific, both as a creator of literature and as a critic. He edited works on Synge, anthologies of promising new writers, and poetic collections. He wrote books on witchcraft and poetics, short stories, a novel of speculative fiction, catalogs of art exhibits and memoirs. He wrote or edited over one hundred books and chapbooks during his professional life, and was a founding editor for The Malahat Review, an internationally-published Canadian literary quarterly which is still produced today. In poetic circles he is best known for One Leaf Shaking, a collection of previously-published poetry he wrote in the 1970s and 1980s.
Robin Skelton was described by one acquaintance as "a man of wide-ranging interests, both scholarly and religious, with a fine appreciation of poetry, contemporary art, mystery novels, and Irish whiskey." His religious influences are primarily Wiccan, and he has said in an interview that it was poetry which led him to spell-making and Wicca and that the two were "very much intertwined" by his later life. In fact, one of his last written books was The Practice of Witchcraft Today: An Introduction to Beliefs and Rituals, published in 1995.