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. We try to keep BookBrowse's biographies both up to date and accurate, but with many thousands of lives to keep track of it's a tough task. So, please help us - if the information about a particular author is out of date or inaccurate, and you know of a more complete source, please let us know. Authors: If you wish to make changes to your bio, send your complete biography as you would like it displayed so that we can replace the old with the new.