Wayne Johnston to open literary festival
Newfoundland author Wayne Johnston, one of Canada's most popular, critically heralded, and internationally successful novelists, will open the 2011 Pen and Inkling Literary Festival in Charlottetown with a public reading at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery on Tuesday, September 27, at 7:30 pm. Admission is free. A reception and book signing will follow.
Johnston will read from his new novel, A World Elsewhere, which takes us to St. John's, Princeton, and North Carolina at the close of the nineteenth century. At the heart of the story is the friendship and perilous entanglement of two men who meet at Princeton University: Landish Druken, a Newfoundlander and failing writer, and Padgett Vanderluyden, disappointing son of the wealthiest man in America's Gilded Age. In this novel of loyalties, enigmas, grandiosities, lies, and betrayal, Johnston once again dazzles with what American author Richard Ford calls his 'rich, irresistibly readable prose…deft intelligence, and a rare sense of what's truly interesting to tell about life.' And, of course, there is Johnston's famous humour.
His earlier best-selling novels include The Custodian of Paradise, The Navigator of New York, and The Colony of Unrequited Dreams with the central character based on Premier Joey Smallwood. Lord Baltimore's Mansion, a compelling memoir of three generations of fathers and sons on Newfoundland's Avalon Peninsula, won the Charles Taylor Prize, Canada's most prestigious award for creative non-fiction. He also wrote the screenplay for the movie adaptation of his novel The Divine Ryans. He is a talented athlete as well, but his path into the writing life was partly determined when his hockey equipment was accidentally thrown out with the trash.
Wayne Johnston's reading is jointly hosted by the UPEI English Department's ‘Winter's Tales Author Series,' Confederation Centre Art Gallery, and the PEI Writers' Guild. Support is generously provided by the Canada Council for the Arts and the City of Charlottetown's Cultural Capital grant for the PEI Writers' Guild's Pen and Inkling Festival.
