Fonds MsC-80 - June Skinner (Rohan O'Grady) fonds

June Skinner (nee O’Grady) was born on July 23, 1922 in Vancouver, BC. After graduating high school in 1940, Skinner worked at the Capilano Golf and Country Club and then in the library at the Vancouver Sun. The former is where she met her husband Frederick Snowdon Skinner. They had three children together and raised them in West Vancouver.

Skinner was primarily active as an author between 1961 and 1981. She published four novels under the pen name Rohan O’Grady and one novel under the name of A. Carleon. None of Skinner’s novels were published by Canadian publishers and instead were published in New York and London. Skinner struggled to get her novels into Canada though she herself was a Canadian writer. She often wrote in her letters that she could not buy her own books in the local book stores.

Skinner’s most famous work is Let’s Kill Uncle, which was made into a horror film in 1966. Both Let’s Kill Uncle and June’s second novel, Pippin’s Journal, were illustrated by Edward Gorey. Skinner’s work was rediscovered in 2009 with an article in The Believer about Let’s Kill Uncle, and that novel was reprinted in 2011 by Bloomsbury. After 20 years of writing novels, Skinner gave up and stopped. She told her son-in-law, Keith Maillard, that is was a relief to stop and that she did not miss it at all.

In the late 1990’s Skinner began to suffer from dementia. She died on March 17, 2014 at the age of 91.