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Alfred Elton van Vogt
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Author.
Born on a farm at Edenburg on 26 April 1912, son of Heinrich “Henry” Vogt and Aganetha Buhr, his family lived in the McConnell House in Morden from 1922 to 1926. They moved to Winnipeg in time for him to start high school. Through the 1930s, he worked a series of odd jobs to pay the bills while pursuing a writing career. Some of his non-science fiction stories were submitted to pulp magazines like True Story. He wrote short plays for CKY Radio and he was a trades writer for the McLean Publishing Company.
On 9 May 1939, he married Edna Mayne Hull (1905-?, daughter of John Thomas Hull), a stenographer from Brandon, at Winnipeg. The pair moved to Ottawa, Ontario where he worked as a clerk with the Canadian Department of National Defense throughout the Second World War. During this time, both Vogt and Hull began writing science fiction stories for Astounding Science Fiction.
They moved to California in 1944 and he continued to write for Astounding Science Fiction along with L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Dianetics (and later Scientology) with whom he collaborated for a time. Over the course of a long career, he wrote 85 novels and collections of short stories, including the classics Slan (1946), The Voyage of the Space Beagle (1950), and Weapon Shops of Isher (1951). He published the autobiography Reflections of A. E. van Vogt in 1975. In 1995, he was awarded the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award by the Science Fiction Writers of America, the only Canadian to be so recognized.
He died at Los Angeles, California on 26 January 2000. He is commemorated by the A. E. Van Vogt Award of the Winnipeg Science Fiction Association.
See also:
Reflections of A. E. van Vogt: The Autobiography of a Science Fiction Giant by A. E. Van Vogt, 1975.
“Surrational Dreams: A. E. Van Vogt and Mennonite Science Fiction” by Scott Ellis, Prairie Fire: A Canadian Magazine of New Writing, Summer 1994.
Birth registrations [Edna May Hull, Alfred Vogt], Manitoba Vital Statistics.
Marriage registration [Alfred Vogt, Edna May Hull], Manitoba Vital Statistics.
“Science-fiction grandmaster van Vogt dies at 87,” Winnipeg Free Press, 2 February 2000, page 52.
Press release, Winnipeg Science Fiction Association, 26 April 2012.
This page was prepared by Sabrina Janke and Gordon Goldsborough.
Page revised: 21 October 2025
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