Norman Levine was born in 1923 and was educated at McGill University in Canada. During the Second World War he flew with a Lancaster Squadron from a base in Yorkshire. The year he was awarded his MA, in 1949, he emigrated to England and settled in St Ives for the next thirty-one years. In 1980 he returned to Canada, to Toronto. Later he commuted between the two countries. He died in England in 2005.

Throughout his life Levine has written numerous poems, short stories and novels, and St Ives figures prominently in many of them, including:

Canada made me (1958)

I don’t want to know anyone too well (1971)

Thin Ice (1979)

Something happened here (1991)

The first book that he had published, a book of poems called The Tightrope Walker (1950), was the first book that Guido Morris printed at his Latin Press in St Ives. Set by hand, and printed on hand-made paper, it had a drawing by Sven Berlin on its frontispiece. Only two hundreds copies were printed.

Levine became a friend of many of the painters in St Ives, and their influence, on his work, can be seen in the way he uses images in his writing. In 1954 he organized an exhibition to tour Canada of the work of Peter Lanyon, Patrick Heron, Terry Frost, John Wells, Patrick Haughton and Bryan Wynter.

In 1972 the BBC made a film Norman Levine’s St Ives. It has also been shown in other countries where Levine’s books were published. A fine art book The Beat & The Still published in 1990, is exclusively of St Ives, with paintings by the Canadian painter, Ron Bolt.

Levine’s second novel From a Seaside Town (1970) is entirely set in St Ives, and Levine says of it himself (in a letter he wrote to Marion Whybrow in 1992) that ‘in many ways St Ives is its main character’. The following description of the town is very redolent of a picture of St Ives in the past:

‘You feel the inertia of this place during the winter months. The summer restaurants are closed, shops are empty, the “for sale” signs are up. Wherever you walk you feel you are walking by empty rooms.’