Wayne Johnston

Photo Welland Tribune

At the age of 27, the young Newfoundlander Wayne Johnston won The WH Smith/Books in Canada award for the Story of Bobby O'Malley. He penned The Divine Ryans first as a novel and later as a screenplay. The movie was made in 1999.

In 2000, Johnston won the Charles Taylor Prize creative non-fiction prize for his memoir of Ferryland, an archeological site on the south shore of the Avalon Peninsula in his home province of Newfoundland.

This book, Baltimore's Mansion was a bestseller in Germany and the Netherlands as well as in Canada, where the National Post called it a "non-fiction novel."

Johnston's most recent novel is A World Elsewhere. Published in August 2011, it is already a national bestseller, a Globe and Mail Best Book. It has also been nominated for the Giller Prize.
Other well-known works include The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (1999) and The Navigator of New York (2003), which was also nominated for the Giller. Both were bestsellers.