Wayne Johnston

Wayne Johnston was born and raised in Goulds, Newfoundland. Widely acclaimed for his magical weaving of fact and fiction, his masterful plotting, and his gift for both description and character, his #1 nationally bestselling novels include The Divine Ryans, A World Elsewhere, The Custodian of Paradise, The Navigator of New York and The Colony of Unrequited Dreams. His first book, The Story of Bobby O’Malley, published when he was just 26 years old, won the WH Smith/Books in Canada First Novel Award. Baltimore’s Mansion (1999), a memoir about his father and grandfather, won the inaugural Charles Taylor Prize for literary non-fiction. The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, published in 1998, was nominated for 16 national and international awards including the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, and was a Canada Reads finalist defended by Justin Trudeau. A theatrical adaptation of the novel recently toured Canada. Johnston’s most recent novel, First Snow, Last Light, was a national bestseller and longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin prize.

Website: waynejohnston.ca
Twitter: @waynejohnston17

I have been a Wayne Johnston fan since my teens. His books are the ones that showed me that my own backyard was worth writing about. In Jennie’s Boy, a glorious tale of bedmobiles and jug baths drawn from his own life, he showed me what was behind closed doors just up the road from me. Like the best Newfoundland storytellers do, he made me laugh and then pause to think of how we can find love and joy in a most untraditional childhood.” –Alan Doyle

FESTIVAL BOOK

Jennie’s Boy: A Newfoundland Childhood

Consummate storyteller and bestselling novelist Wayne Johnston reaches back into his past to bring us a sad, tender and at times extremely funny memoir of his Newfoundland boyhood.

For six months between 1966 and 1967, Johnston and his family lived in a wreck of a house across from his grandparents in Goulds, Newfoundland. At seven, Johnston was sickly and skinny, unable to keep food down, plagued with insomnia and a relentless cough that no doctor could diagnose, though they had already removed his tonsils, adenoids and appendix. To the neighbours, he was known as “Jennie’s boy,” a back-handed salute to his tiny, ferocious mother, who felt judged for her son’s condition at the same time as worried he might never grow up.

Unable to go to school, Johnston spent his days with his witty, religious, deeply eccentric maternal grandmother, Lucy. During these six months of his childhood, he and Lucy faced two life-or-death crises, and only one of them lived to tell the tale.

Jennie’s Boy is Johnston’s tribute to a family and a community that were simultaneously fiercely protective of him and fed up with having to make allowances for him. His boyhood was full of pain, yes, but also tenderness and Newfoundland wit. By that wit, and through love – often expressed in the most unloving ways – Johnston survived.

GET THE BOOK

Owl’s Nest Books (Calgary) | Calgary Public Library