Claive Booker was born in Toronto in 1948, and raised, in part, by his great-grandmother and her sister, giving him a sense of family continuity. His mother had him reading before he began kindergarten, and quoted from such favorite writers as Edna St-Vincent Milay, Dorothy Parker, John Donne, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. "This early exposure to love of language and to what could be done with it enabled me, from the earliest age possible, to enter into a wide universe of thoughts, culture, and history," he says.

Educated in parochial and public schools, Claive left at age sixteen for a life of working in a psychiatric hospital, in small advertising agencies, for the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops in Ottawa, and finally in Montréal, with persons with AIDS who wished to remain in their homes, rather than opt for hospice care.

A constant throughout has been his progression in sculpture, drawing and printmaking; his art works are in collections in Canada and Europe. Spare time is occupied in liturgical embroidery, in the paintings of icons, "and the construction of bindings for liturgical books, and for some others, rather more profane."