One of B.C. most famous writers in the 1980s and 1990s has died at the age of 81.

W.P. Kinsella, author of Shoeless Joe and several other books, passed away in Hope in a doctor-assisted death.

Shoeless Joe told the story of an Iowa man, Ray Kinsella, who builds a baseball stadium in his cornfield when he hears a voice saying "If you build it, they will come." Once the diamond was completed, the notorious 1919 Chicago "Black Sox" team show up to play. Some of the real-life players from that team, including star outfielder Shoeless Joe Jackson, were banned from Major League Baseball for life following a World Series gambling scandal.

Shoeless Joe won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship and the Books in Canada First Novel Award. It was later adapted into a popular movie, Field of Dreams, starring Kevin Costner.

Kinsella stopped writing for several years after being hit by a car in 1997. His latest book, Russian Dolls, will be published next year.

In the 1990s, Kinsella was an outspoken supporter of the right-wing Reform Party of Canada, which was led by Preston Manning.

He generated controversy later that decade for "cultural appropriation" when he adopted the voice of an indigenous person in The Secrets of the Northern Lights.

It wasn't the first time that Kinsella, a native of Alberta, had included a Native character in his writing. But his identification with the political right at the time of publication ignited greater controversy than anything else he had ever written.

In 2001, Kinsella sued his much younger former girlfriend, Evelyn Lau, for defamation after she had written an award-winning article about their relationship called "W.P. and Me" in Vancouver magazine.

Kinsella was an officer of the Order of Canada, a member of the Order of British Columbia, and winner of the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award.