Wayne Johnston
was born in Newfoundland in 1958 and grew up in Goulds, a small community a few
miles south of St. John's. When he was a boy, he couldn't imagine a world
beyond the island. "The only outside world I ever saw was on television, and I
didn't really even believe that world existed." People were still divided
over the Confederation with Canada, which had happened only in 1949. His family
had a habit of moving around to different neighborhoods and his schooling was
‘hyper-Catholic', traits which would feature in his autobiographical first
novel.
He graduated with a BA (Hons) in English from Memorial University of
Newfoundland, and worked from 1979 to 1981 as a reporter at the St. John's Daily
News. Being a reporter was a crash course in how society works, but he realized
he didn't want it as a career. "I'm not that outgoing of a person and you
have to be in order to be a good reporter." He moved away from Newfoundland,
firstly to Ottawa, and took up the writing of fiction full-time. In 1983 he
graduated with an MA from the University of New Brunswick. His first book, The
Story of Bobby O'Malley, was published shortly after, and won the
W.H.Smith/Books in Canada First Novel Award. He followed this success two years
later with The Time of Their Lives, which won the Canadian Authors'
Association Award for Most Promising Young Writer.
His third novel, The Divine Ryans, again a portrait of Irish
Catholic Newfoundland, centers on a nine-year-old hockey fanatic, whose father
dies and whose family goes to live with relatives who once had money but are
fast declining. Time Out has called it "achingly funny, needle
sharp…with heart, soul and brains". One of Johnston's most comic novels,
it earned him the title of ‘the Roddy Doyle of Canada'. The Divine Ryans won the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Prize and has been adapted into a
film starring Oscar-nominated actor Pete Postlethwaite. Johnston wrote the
screenplay himself for this and also for the adaptation of his next novel, Human
Amusements, also optioned for film.
The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, Johnston's fifth novel, in 1998 was
shortlisted for the most prestigious fiction awards in Canada, the Governor
General's Award and the Giller Prize, the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour and
the Rogers Communication Writers Trust Fiction Prize; it won the Thomas Raddall
Atlantic Fiction Prize and the Canadian Authors Association Award for Fiction. A
glowing New York Times Book Review cover story caused the book to leap to
the upper ranks of the Amazon.com top 100 selling books of the day. It has been
called a ‘Dickensian romp of a novel', which uses the career of
Newfoundland's first premier to create a love story and a tragi-comic elegy to
an impossible country.
Published across North America and Europe in several languages, the novel caused
some controversy in Canada among those who recalled the real Joey Smallwood, a
man who was hated by many Newfoundlanders, including Johnston's own family,
for bringing the island into Canada. Although his strongly anti-confederate
family could barely bring themselves to mention Smallwood's name, Johnston
read a biography of the politician when he was 14.
Johnston considered carefully the different ways of establishing
‘fictional/historical plausibility' in the novel. Re-reading Don Delillo's
novel Libra, he observed how "Delillo gave himself the freedom to
invent scenes, incidents, conversations as long as they seemed plausible within
the fictional world that he created." He also considered Salman Rushdie's Midnight's
Children, where, in spite of the magic realism, India still gains
independence in 1948, and political figures are elected or assassinated under
the same circumstances as their real-life counterparts. He decided he would not
change or omit anything that was publicly known. "I would fill in the
historical record in a way that could have been true, and flesh out and
dramatize events that, though publicly known, were not recorded in detail. Most
importantly, I would invent for Smallwood a lover/nemesis (Sheilagh Fielding)
who could have existed (but didn't) and wove her and Smallwood's story into the
history of Newfoundland. This would be my plausibility contract with the
reader."
In 1999 he published Baltimore's Mansion, his first non-fiction book, a
family memoir that also became a national bestseller and won the inaugural
Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction. Johnston uses the stories of his
own childhood and his father and grandfather to cast light on Newfoundland's
struggle over relinquishing independence in 1949. A National Post reviewer
concluded that it was a ‘non-fiction novel' drawing on all Johnston's
narrative powers to "shape the materials of real life into a work of
astonishing beauty and power". In another review, Quill and Quire said "I began to smell the smells, hear the lilt, and experience a sense of the
fierce attachment Newfoundlanders feel to their home province no matter where
they live," commenting that Newfoundland geography, history and culture
permeates Johnston's books.
Johnston has lived in Toronto since 1989, although he has to date written
exclusively about Newfoundland. "I couldn't write about the island while I was
there," he says. "Life was too immediate. I was too inundated by the place
and its details. I'd write about something and see it when I walked across the
street the next day." A "benign homesickness" has become a kind of fuel
for writing about the island. He talks of Newfoundland as being too "overwhelmingly beautiful and substantial" to capture. To write with any
kind of objectivity, "I need distance to get that sense of what is
important and what is significant and what is not."
This biography was last updated on 01/07/2003.
A note about the biographies
We try to keep BookBrowse's biographies both up to date and accurate. However, with over 1,500 lives to keep track of it's inevitable that
some won't be as current or as complete as we would like. So, please help us - if the information about a particular author is out of date,
inaccurate or simply very short, and you know of a more complete source, please let us know. Authors and those connected with authors:
If you wish to make changes to your bio, please send your complete biography as you would like it displayed so that we replace the old with the new.
One of the most celebrated writers of our time gives us his first cycle of short fiction: five brilliantly etched, interconnected stories in which music is a vivid and essential character.
In her most accomplished novel, Barbara Kingsolver takes us on an epic journey from the Mexico City of artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo to the America of Pearl Harbor, FDR, and J. Edgar Hoover. The Lacuna is a poignant story of a man pulled between two nations as they invent their...
The acclaimed author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude returns with a roar with this gorgeous, searing portrayal of Manhattanites wrapped in their own delusions, desires, and lies.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author— "an immensely gifted writer and a magical prose stylist" (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times)—offers his first major work of nonfiction, an autobiographical narrative as inventive, beautiful, and powerful as his acclaimed, award-winning fiction.
Like Robin Hood, Zorro is a story that almost everyone knows, but few have read. The original book by Johnston McCulley is out of print and ...
read more
I'm 13 years old and my teacher handed me this book and told me to read and do a report on it. I looked at the cover, saw the title (which made no ...
read more
I'm 13 years old and my teacher handed me this book and told me to read and do a report on it. I looked at the cover, saw the title (which made no ...
read more
The 2009 National Book Award Winners(Nov 19 2009) The winners of the 2009 National Book Awards have been announced at the National Book Foundation's 60th National Book Awards Ceremony and Benefit...
Full Story
Google Settlement Filed(Nov 13 2009) After two delays, attorneys for the AAP, Authors Guild and Google filed an amended settlement agreement today in an effort to end litigation brought by the...
Full Story
Become a member!
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends only the most interesting and well written books and provides you with everything you need to decide which are
right for you - so you can browse the best and ignore the rest.
One Month Free Trial
RSS feed
