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| |  Wayne Johnston was born and raised in Goulds, Newfoundland. After a brief stint in pre-Med, Wayne obtained a BA in English from Memorial University. He worked as a reporter for the St. John's Daily News before deciding to devote himself full-time to writing. En route to being published, Wayne earned an MA (Creative Writing) from the University of New Brunswick. Then he got off to a quick start. His first book, The Story of Bobby O'Malley, published when he was just 27 years old, won the WH Smith/Books in Canada First Novel award for the best first novel published in the English language in Canada in that year. Subsequent books consistently received critical praise and increasing public attention. The Divine Ryans was adapted to the silver screen in a production starring Academy Award winner Pete Postlethwaite - Wayne wrote the screenplay. Baltimore's Mansion, a memoire dealing with his grandfather, his father and Wayne himself was tremendously well received and won the most prestigious prize for creative non-fiction awarded in Canada - the Charles Taylor Prize. Both The Colony of Unrequited Dreams and The Navigator of New York spent extended periods of time on bestseller lists in Canada and have also been published in the US, Britain, Germany, Holland, China and Spain. Colony was identified by the Globe and Mail newspaper as one of the 100 most important Canadian books ever produced (including both fiction and non-fiction). Since 2004, Wayne has held a Distinguished Chair in Creative Writing at Hollins University in Virginia - one of the top ranked schools in the US for graduate studies in creative writing. He commutes back and forth to Toronto where he has lived for almost 20 years. Wayne is also a contributing editor to The Walrus magazine and publishes short pieces in that magazine from time to time. He is also an engaging speaker who very much likes to meet his readers at festivals and other literary events. Recently, Wayne was the guest writer at a summer literary seminar held in St. Petersburg, Russia - where he enjoyed the "white nights" of a far north mid-summer and gained a new appreciation for the World Cup of Soccer (from both students and faculty). Wayne has also always been something of a natural athlete - for example, he was once part of a championship ball-hockey team. Luckily (in retrospect) when he was still in the formative stages of considering future career paths, his ice hockey equipment, which was carefully stowed in a garbage bag in the basement was accidentally put out with the trash. The world of literature benefited; is is possible that the National Hockey League lost a star in the process? |
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