One of Canadian literature's most notorious individuals, Crad Kilodney, died yesterday, April 14. For many years beginning in the late 1970s and into the early 1990s, Kilodney was a fixture on Toronto's city streets, selling his books and pamphlets, published under his imprint Charnel House, with such provocative titles as Excrement, Lightning Struck My Dick, Putrid Scum and Simple Stories for Idiots. As Kildoney is quoted on the web site dedicated to his literary legacy, "I came back to the earth plane to be a writer, because I didn’t get to be one in my previous life." (He claimed to have been a "rich idler" in his previous life.)

In total, Kilodney wrote over 30 books between 1978 and 1992. He largely retired from writing in the mid-1990s. He was a provocative figure who enjoyed pushing the buttons of Canada's biggest publishers, including hatching a famous literary hoax. Submitting poetry and stories by famous CanLit figures to various publishers and literary contests under made-up names, he hoped to expose the ignorance and hypocrisy of the publishing industry. All the work was rejected. However Michael Harris of Montreal's Vehicule Press, which received a collection of Irving Layton poems written under the name Herman Mlunga Mbongo, did send a nice rejection letter, noting, "Irving Layton, to whom I showed your manuscript, was as delighted as I was to see how useful his poems still are." The letter and some background on the hoax, contained in the Crad Kilodney Papers held here at the Fisher, can be seen below, along with some images from various Kilodney books.

Death of Crad Kilodney