His fiction made people laugh and cry, she added. “He was a dedicated story teller, performer, curmudgeon and irascible and difficult man,” her statement said. Swayze said Kinsella persuaded her to become a literary agent in 1994 to represent his work. Kinsella’s agent Carolyn Swayze issued a statement on Friday saying he was “a unique, creative and outrageously opinionated man.” Steele added that he hopes more people pick up Kinsella’s many books, especially his stories about the fictional Hobbema Indian Reserve. Steele said Kinsella often wished he had written Shoeless Joe later, “so that way people would have read some of his other works first.” His 1982 magic-realist novel “Shoeless Joe,” about a farmer who hears a voice telling him to build a baseball field, was adapted into the popular Kevin Costner film “Field of Dreams.”

Kinsella published almost 30 books of fiction, non-fiction and poetry, and was a winner of the Order of Canada and the Order of British Columbia. His literary agency said in a statement that Kinsella’s final work of fiction, “Russian Dolls,” will be published next year. His biographer Willie Steele said it took years for Kinsella to regain his “creative impulse to write,” contributing to a 13-year break between his published novels before “Butterfly Winter” was released in 2011. Three years after the accident, he said he had no interest in writing fiction and was spending his days playing Scrabble on the Internet. Kinsella suffered a head injury when he was in a car accident in 1997.

The agency did not provide details about Kinsella’s health. His literary agency confirms the writer had a doctor-assisted death on Friday in Hope, B.C. Kinsella, the B.C.-based author of “Shoeless Joe,” the award-winning novel that became the film “Field of Dreams,” has died at 81. Kinsella stands on the baseball field before game five of the World Series between Toronto Blue Jays and Atlanta Braves at the Skydome in Toronto, Ontario, Thursday, Oct.

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