Wayne Johnston Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Wayne Johnston Biography

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.

Johnston's fiction deals primarily with the province of Newfoundland and Labrador, often in a historical setting. En route to being published, Johnston earned an MA (Creative Writing) from the University of New Brunswick. His first book, The Story of Bobby O'Malley, 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. The Divine Ryans was adapted to the silver screen in a production starring Academy Award winner Pete Postlethwaite using Johnston's screenplay. Baltimore's Mansion, a memoir dealing with his grandfather, his father and Wayne himself 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. The Colony of Unrequited Dreams was identified by the Globe and Mail newspaper as one of the 100 most important Canadian books ever produced. His more recent works include The Custodian of Paradise (2006), A World Elsewhere (2011), and The Son of a Certain Woman (2013).

Wayne Johnston's website

This bio was last updated on 09/05/2015. In a perfect world, we would like to keep all of BookBrowse's biographies up to date, but with many thousands of lives to keep track of it's simply impossible to do. So, if the date of this bio is not recent, you may wish to do an internet search for a more current source, such as the author's website or social media presence. If you are the author or publisher and would like us to update this biography, send the complete text and we will replace the old with the new.