A Conservative senator from Ontario has been identified as the anonymous donor who helped save the childhood home of author Joy Kogawa.

Senator Nancy Ruth was honoured Friday in Vancouver for her role in saving the Vancouver home from demolition.

Senator Ruth's intervention in 2006 came in the nick of time for the one-storey stucco house on a quiet residential street in Vancouver's Marpole area.

A public campaign had been mounted to save the home, which figures in Kogawa's much loved novel, Obasan, about the persecution of Canada's Japanese during the Second World War.

But Vancouver real estate prices are high and fundraisers were still far from their goal as the deadline for demolition approached.

"We were struggling," said Bill Turner, executive director of The Land Conservancy, a non-profit charitable land trust which tries to protect historic or culturally significant properties.

"We had to find more than $700,000 to purchase it and then we have the on-going responsibility to restoring the house to the way it was in Joy's time, and endow it for its future management. And the time was running out."

Then came the $500,000 from an anonymous source, which put the campaign over the top.

Kogawa is ecstatic over the rescue of the house, which still has the cherry tree she remembers admiring as a child.

The Friday ceremony was a chance to publicly thank Ruth for her generosity.

"You know, I didn't know her at the time," Kogawa said in an interview with CBC News. "I was surprised by the gift. As I got to know her, I realized that that's exactly the kind of thing she would support and care about."

Ruth has been active throughout her life on poverty, women's and equality issues. She is among the co-founders of the Women's Legal and Education Action Fund (LEAF) and a member of the Order of Canada.

She also has also been active in the Canadian Women's Foundation, the Women's Future Fund and the Charter of Rights Coalition.

The house is to be turned into a retreat for writers from repressive states, with the help of the Writers Guild of Canada.

Kogawa's books, Obasan and Naomi's Road, are internationally recognized. Kogawa lived in the house with her family from 1937 to 1942, when it was confiscated by the government.

With files from Paul Grant