TRIUMF is Canada's national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics, operated as a joint venture by a consortium of universities. Its facilities support both pure and applied research and include the particle accelerator (cyclotron) and the Isotope Separation and ACceleration (ISAC) facility.

The idea of building a cyclotron in western Canada was first conceived by Dr. J.R. Richardson on Galiano Island in 1962. Simon Fraser University, the University of British Columbia and the University of Victoria collaborated on a proposal in 1966 for the Tri-University Meson Facility (TRIUMF). The University of Alberta joined the group and TRIUMF was formally established by the four universities in 1968 with funding from the Atomic Energy Control Board (AECB).

The early years of TRIUMF were primarily concerned with the planning, design and construction of the facility on the campus of UBC, and on February 9, 1976 it was officially opened by the Prime Minister of Canda, Pierre Trudeau. In the same year the four founding universities signed a Letter of Agreement with the National Research Council of Canada (NRC), to provide on-going core operational funding. The organization was formally constituted as a Joint Venture between the four universities in November 1981. A number of other Canadian universities are affiliated with TRIUMF as Associate Members, while Carleton University and the University of Toronto became Joint Venture members around 2003-2004. Although owned by the consortium, TRIUMF has always made its facilities available to other Canadian and foreign researchers.

TRIUMF is governed by a Board of Management which comprises individuals drawn from its Joint Venture and Associate Member universities and which is responsible for policy, budget, and fund-raising. TRIUMF is administered by a Director, assisted by a number of Advisory Committees, whose number and composition has varied over the years. The organization is internally structured into a number of divisions which have also changed over time through periodic reorganizations.

Donald Baird, SFU's University Librarian, was one of the driving forces behind the formation of the Tri Universities Library (TRIUL) consortium between SFU, the University of British Columbia and the University of Victoria. It informally grew to include all publicly funded libraries in the province. Under the auspices of TRIUL, libraries in B.C. came together to cooperate in the establishment of the British Columbia Union Catalogue (BCUC) and promote other cost saving initiatives for library processing and cataloguing divisions.

Peter Trower was born on August 25, 1930, in St. Leonards-on-Sea in England, and was educated at Dragon School, Oxford. His father, Stephen Trower, an air survey pilot, died as a result of a plane crash in 1936. In July 1940, Trower's mother Mary brought himself and his brother to Canada aboard an evacuee ship, and they settled in Vancouver, B.C. Not long after their arrival, his mother married mill superintendent Trygg Iversen and the family moved to Port Mellon, B.C. Following Iverson's death in 1944, the family subsequently lived in Gibsons and Vancouver. In 1948 Trower left school; he began working at his first logging camp in 1949, and he worked off and on in logging camps along the B.C. coast for the next twenty-two years. Between logging jobs he also worked as a smelter worker in Kitimat, a surveyor, pulp-mill hand, shakecutter and baker. While in the logging camps, he pursued cartooning and writing interests in his spare time. Aspiring to become a professional cartoonist, he enrolled in the Vancouver School of Art in 1958. However, at the same time, he was also becoming increasingly interested in writing, and he dropped out of art school in 1960. Around this time, Trower frequented the Alcazar Hotel on Dunsmuir Street in Vancouver, in the company of a number of other poets, including Milton Acorn, John Newlove, and Al Purdy. The hotel appears in the poem "Alcazar Requiem" from Trower's 1997 book "Hitting the Bricks." In 1967, Trower was arrested for the possession of marijuana, serving a one-month sentence at Oakalla Prison in Burnaby, B.C., an experience documented in a number of his future writings, including the five-part "Okalla Suite" of poems in his 1982 book "Goosequill Snags."

Trower self-published his first collection of poetry, "Poems for a Dark Sunday," as a mimeo in 1965. Talonbooks released his first commercially-published poetry collection "Moving Through the Mystery," in 1969. In 1971, he stopped logging and became the Associate Editor of Raincoast Chronicles. In 1972, Trower wrote a letter to Al Purdy after meeting him in MacLeod's bookstore years before; Purdy responded positively and over the next two decades became an important friend and mentor to Trower. During this period in the early 1970s, Trower began writing and publishing prose alongside his poetry, contributing articles and short stories to various publications including the Coast News and Vancouver Magazine. Much of his writing has been influenced by his years spent in logging camps. His experiences as a logger and poet were explored in the 1976 CBC documentary "Between the Sky and the Splinters," titled after his 1974 book of poetry of the same name.

In April of 1979, Trower's mother Mary passed away. He eulogized her in the Coast News article "A Very Special Little Lady." Shortly thereafter, Trower reconnected with an old friend, writer and amateur B.C. historian Yvonne Mearns Klan, and the two began a romantic partnership that would last until her death in 2004. In 1982, Trower and Klan embarked on a writing project about the life of Herbert Emerson Wilson (aka Herb Wilson), tentatively titled "Holy Herb" and later "Gangsterquest." The book was never completed, but their work did produce the poem "The Legend of Holy Herb" in Trower's 1989 book "Unmarked Doorways." In 1985, Alan Twigg and Tom Shandel made a second CBC-produced documentary about Trower, entitled "Peter Trower: The Men There Were Then."

Beginning in the 1980s, Trower performed with the blues-rock band "Industrial Accident," and with the variety show "Caulk Boots and Marlin Spikes," which featured stories and songs of loggers. He published his first novel in 1993; "Grogan's Cafe" is the first book in what would come to be known as the Terry Belshaw Trilogy of novels, also including "Dead Man's Ticket" (1996), and "The Judas Hills" (2000). The same year "Grogan's Cafe" was published, Trower played himself in "The Diary of Evelyn Lau," a film based on the life and writing of the eponymous Canadian writer. In 2003, he released his first musical album, "Sidewalks and Sidehills," which features Trower reading his poems to a jazz back beat. He frequently performed at Vancouver's Railway Club on Dunsmuir street.

Trower received several awards and honours during his career, including the Gillian Lowndes Award (1997), the BC2000 Book Award (2000), the first annual Peter Trower Alternative Poetry Award (2000), the BC Gas Lifetime Achievement Award (2002), the Terasen Lifetime Achievement Award for an Outstanding Literary Career in British Columbia (2002), and the Canadian Authors Association Jack Chalmers Poetry Award (2005).

Trower passed away in North Vancouver on November 10, 2017.

Tsunami Editions was a Vancouver, B.C. literary press operating between 1986 and 2001. It was founded by editor Lary Bremner (Timewell) in order to publish early works by younger poets associated with Vancouvers Kootenay School of Writing. The editorship eventually was passed to Deanna Ferguson and Catriona Strang, who began producing full-length trade-books with the support of private donors. Later books and chapbooks were edited and produced by Ferguson and Michael Barnholden.

Gael Turnbull (7 April 1928 - 2 July 2004) was a Scottish poet who was an important precursor of the British Poetry Revival. Turnbull was born in Edinburgh and grew up in the North of England and in Canada. He studied Natural Science at Cambridge University and graduated in Medicine from the University of Pennsylvania in 1951. In 1957, Turnbull started Migrant Press, one of the first British-run presses to focus on poets in the modernist tradition. His work was featured in the groundbreaking Revival anthology Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain (1969). His own books include A Gathering of Poems 1950-1980 (1983) and Rattle of Scree: Poems (1997). He was also published in the anthologies The New British Poetry (1988), Other: British and Irish Poetry since 1970 (1999) and Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry (2001). In the early 1990s he returned to Edinburgh where he worked on what he termed kinetic poems; texts for installation in which the movement of the reader and/or of the text became part of the reading experience. He died on a visit to Herefordshire of a sudden brain hemorrhage.