George Ryga is best known for The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, one of the most successful plays written in Canada. It established that an English-Canadian play could address serious social issues in vernacular language and nonrealistic style and still be commercially appealing, helping make possible the explosion of Canadian drama that occurred in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Ryga's other dramatic works and his fiction are similarly distinguished by a strong social consciousness and the attempt to create folk art using contemporary themes.

Ryga, the son of George and Maria Kolodka Ryga, was born and raised on his Ukrainian immigrant parents' Deep Creek homestead in northern Alberta. He left school at twelve, spending the next five years studying by correspondence and doing day labor, often alongside local Indians: "we were struggling exactly the same way to get out of the ghetto as they were from the reserve...