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| Melita Hume presenting trophy to young athlete |
Melita
Hume,
who has died at the age of 91, on December 27, 2012, was born in June, 1921 in
Matapedia, Canada, the daughter of William and Mary Fraser. She spent most of her life in Quebec: on the
Gaspe Peninsula, then in Melbourne, St-Lambert and Richmond. Melita was married to the late Ian Hume, an athletics
coach and sporting figure, for 64 years. Trained as a teacher at Macdonald
College, McGill, she had a lifelong thirst for knowledge and a great love of
reading and collecting books that she passed on to all her children and
grandchildren, with whom she was a curious mixture of the stern and the imaginatively
playful. Melita was characterised by a great sense of composure, integrity,
patience and intellectual curiosity. Melita was always willing to debate any
idea or issue, often over a hearty home-cooked meal grown from her garden. She loved to walk or ski in her woods, and
was a naturalist, with an expert command of the names of all the flora and
fauna of her region. Over the decades she compiled a personal library of tens
of thousands of books, which she carefully categorised – Canadian writing and
Russian literature were among her favourites.
In her country home she might be found by a roaring fire reading Speak, Memory by Nabokov, or the latest
anthology of Eastern Townships poetry; nearby would be annotated issues of Books In Canada. She wrote out by longhand thousands of index
cards, consisting of biographical and critical notes, for a vast project (so
far unpublished), which would be an encyclopaedia of Canadian literature. Her
love of poetry, books, and global literature has made her the ideal person to
name a major international poetry prize after.
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