26/07/2025
Soon, we'll be in Newfoundland for our first-ever retreat there, and there'll be many firsts along the way, for sure. One of them is that, for the first time ever, we're including a day at a local literary festival. It's a rare opportunity for total immersion into the literary culture of a place. Our lucky participants on this full retreat will hear from a plethora of authors and moderators, from both the island and across Canada, onstage at Winterset in Summer Literary Festival with the opportunity to meet some of them. Here's the list of authors and their bios.
LOOK --->> 2025 Winterset in Summer Literary Festival Bios
ANGELA ANTLE is a writer, artist, and producer based in St. John’s. Her work has been recognized by the Canadian Association of Journalists, the Atlantic Journalism Awards, The New York Festivals, Gabriels, and Gracie Allen Awards as well as Berlinale, Dublin, Nickel, and Wexford Film Festivals. She is currently completing an interdisciplinary PhD in energy humanities at Memorial University and her debut novel The Saltbox Olive was published by Breakwater Books in 2025.
TED BLADES is a retired journalist and longest-serving host of CBC Radio’s afternoon show On The Go. Three-time finalist at the New York Festivals International Radio Competition and Gold Medal winner in 2015 for best interview. Winner of the inaugural Atlantic Journalism Award for best podcast in 2017. He is happy to be back for Winterset 2025!
GERARD COLLINS is a Newfoundland writer, now living in New Brunswick, whose first novel, Finton Moon, was nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, the Newfoundland and Labrador Heritage and History Award, and won the Percy Janes First Novel Award. His short story collection, Moonlight Sketches, won the 2012 Newfoundland and Labrador Book Award. In 2021 his second novel, The Hush Sisters won an international Next Generation Indie Book Award in the suspense category and was a finalist in the paranormal category. A lecturer at Memorial University for two decades and an occasional lecturer at University of New Brunswick, Gerard has a Ph.D. in American (Gothic) literature. He is an experienced leader of writing retreats and workshops in Canada, the United States, and Europe. Recently, Gerard was invited by the Northrup Frye Festival to teach a Masterclass in creative writing and, in 2022, was a featured author and workshop provider at the Louisiana Book Festival in Baton Rouge. Along with his wife, writer Jane Simpson, Gerard is co-founder of Go and Write! retreats and, when he’s not traveling, he’s working on the Threshold series, a sprawling, epic tale of love, magic, books, and the rise of fascism.
RAMONA DEARING is an award-winning former CBC journalist, host, and producer. For many years, her midday radio show, CrossTalk – now called The Signal – held a popular province-wide book club. Her short fiction collection, So Beautiful, was shortlisted for the Winterset Award and the Danuta Gleed Literary Award. Her work has been included in several editions of Best Canadian Stories.
TAMAS DOBOZY lives in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, and has published four books of short fiction, When X Equals Marylou, Last Notes and Other Stories, Siege 13: Stories (which won the 2012 Rogers Writers Trust of Canada Fiction Prize, and was shortlisted for both the Governor General’s Award: Fiction, and the 2013 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award), and most recently, Ghost Geographies: Fictions. Tamas has published over seventy short stories in journals such as One Story, Fiction, Agni, and Granta, which won an O Henry Prize in 2011, and the Gold Medal for Fiction at the National Magazine Awards in 2014.
MARJORIE DOYLE has published five books of non-fiction, including Mary Foley, Mary Doyle (Boulder Books, 2024). Her columns and essays have appeared in the Globe and Mail, Ottawa Citizen, National Post, Fiddlehead, Geist, Calgary Herald, Queen’s Quarterly, Antigonish Review. Her broadcast career included hosting the national CBC radio show That Time of the Night. Marjorie has been awarded a National Magazine Award, two CBC Radio Awards for Programming Excellence as well as a Golden Sheaf nomination for the documentary Regarding Our Father. As a musician, she was the first female member of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment Band. A former Chair of The Writers’ Union of Canada, she has read across Canada and was writer-in-residence at Haig Brown House on Vancouver Island.
LORNE ELLIOTT is a Canadian comic, playwright, singer/songwriter, and novelist. He studied marine biology while performing folk-guitar as a sideline. He made his first appearance in 1970 at a coffee house in St. John’s, Newfoundland. In 1982, Lorne Elliott founded his company, Productions Turtle Pond Theatre, which went on to produce award winning plays, revues and solo shows he created. Lorne Elliott has toured his work (and his trademark hairstyle) across Canada, the United States and to Australia, and has performed often at the Just For Laughs festival as well as at comedy festivals in Chicago, New York, Vancouver and at the International Fringe Festival in Edmonton. He was host of CBC radio’s Madly Off in All Directions for eleven years. He is also the author of a novella, The Fixer-Upper, and a novel Beach Reading, shortlisted for a Quebec Writers’ Federation award.
DR NOREEN GOLFMAN is Professor Emerita, Memorial University. She was the founding director of the St. John’s International Women’s Film Festival and chaired the board of the festival for thirty years. She’s been the president of the MUN Cinema Series for decades, Vice Chair of PictureNL, and co-chair of Business and Arts NL. In 2019 she received ACTRA’s Woman of the Year Award, and she was inducted into the Order of NL in 2023. She has been a board member and was chair of the Winterset Festival—all thanks to the wonderful late Richard Gwyn to whom one simply could not say no.
JENNIFER GUY was part of a small team of Toronto based women organized by Richard Gwyn to raise funds for the Winterset Award (now the BMO Winterset Award) a quarter of a century ago. She then joined the team which founded the Winterset in Summer Literary Festival. She served as Board member and remains an engaged supporter of the festival. She is thrilled to see the growth and continued success of all events associated with Winterset.
WILLOW KEAN is an actor and writer from Labrador West who now resides in St. John’s. She holds a BFA in theatre from Grenfell College and has spent over twenty-five years working for numerous theatre companies across Newfoundland and Labrador. Most recently she’s appeared on film in The King Tide and onstage in Paul and Linda Plan a Th*****me. She’s been shortlisted for the Cuffer Prize, longlisted for the NLCU Fresh Fish Award, and has won NL Arts and Letters Awards in both fiction and non-fiction. Willow was the winner of the Percy Janes First Novel Award in 2018, and the recipient of the 2015 Rhonda Payne Theatre Award. Her five-woman comedy Supper Club recently completed an island-wide Arts and Culture Centre tour and can be seen onstage this summer at the Gros Morne Theatre Festival. Her first novel Eyes in Front When Running was published by Breakwater Books in 2023. Willow gets angry, cooks, and writes about it at thelittleredchicken.substack.com.
MONICA KIDD is an award-winning journalist and multi-disciplinary writer. Her latest title, The Crane (Breakwater Books, 2025) is a novel set in Wyoming, St. John’s and Notre Dame Bay, 1968-1969 and features a young Vietnam war resister who finds himself in Newfoundland in the middle of an intergenerational story of war trauma. Kidd has published seven previous books of fiction, non-fiction and poetry, as well as shorter pieces in dozens of journals. She previously reported for CBC Radio in St. John’s before going to medical school at Memorial University. She divides her time between St. John’s and Calgary where she works as a family doctor.
ASHLEIGH MATTHEWS is a textile artist living in Conception Bay South, NL, skilled at sewing, and writing, but less skilled at internally identifying and removing cancer cells from her own body. Sharing the reality of having cancer at a young age with authenticity is the guiding principle of Ashleigh’s advocacy within the cancer community and while she wrote her memoir, otherwise grossly unremarkable. Her book was the finalist for the 2024 BMO Winterset award for non-fiction. As a record of her own experience, it also reflects the reality of so many cancer patients across all demographics. Her story is a bummer at times, but at least you know she survived before you read about it.
ROD MOODY-CORBETT is the author of Hides (Breakwater Books), a Globe and Mail pick for Best Summer Reads of 2024, a 49th Shelf Book of the Year, and a #1 Alberta bestseller. His writing has appeared in The Paris Review Daily, Socrates on the Beach, and The Drift, among other publications. He is the recipient of the 2022 Howard O’Hagan Award for Short Story, winner of the CBC Canada Writes Peoples’ Choice Award for Short Story, and serves as a contributing editor for Canadian Notes and Queries.
LISA MOORE is a writer of the short story collections Degrees of Nakedness, Open, and Something for Everyone. She has written the novels Alligator, February, Caught, This Is How We Love and the young adult novel Flannery. She is the co-author with Jack Whalen of the creative non-fiction book Invisible Prisons, which won the 2024 BMO Winterset award for non-fiction. Her novels and story collections have each been translated into at least one, or most of these languages: German, French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Greek, and Turkish. And she is the co-librettist, with Laura Kaminsky, of the opera February adapted from her novel by the same name and has recently written five opera arias for a film adaptation based on the true story of Marguerite de la Roque. She has selected, edited and introduced five anthologies of short stories including Racket, (Breakwater, St. John’s 2015), Us, Now (Breakwater, St. John’s 2021), Hard Ticket ( Breakwater, St. John’s, 2022), Best Canadian Stories (Biblioasis, 2024) and she is the co-editor with Sheena Wilson of the collection We Were In It: very short stories about energy transition (Memorial Press 2025). Lisa teaches Creative Writing at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador.
ELIZABETH MURPHY was born in Newfoundland and completed her Ph.D. in Quebec; she won awards for her research and writing while working at Memorial University, and served as a visiting professor in Bangkok. Nova Scotia is where she now reads, writes, and dreams of summer back home on the island and winter far away in Thailand. Elizabeth’s second novel, The Weather Diviner, was longlisted for the 2025 BMO Winterset Award. Her short fiction has appeared in Quibble Lit, Nixes Mate Review, MoonPark Review, Reckon Review, Tiny Molecules, and others. Find her online .bsky.social or at elizabethmurphy.tiiny.co
ARIZONA O’NEILL is a Montreal-based author and illustrator. She is the author of Est-ce qu’un artiste peut être heureux?, a collection of graphic interviews, and the illustrator of Nelly Arcan’s L’enfant dans le miroir. Her comics have appeared in Hazlitt, Exclaim!, the Montreal Gazette, and mRb. She has created animated videos for many outlets, including the CBC. A regular contributor to Radio-Canada’s Il restera toujours la culture, she is one half of the Bookstagram page . She is currently working on a graphic memoir.
HEATHER O’NEILL is a novelist, short-story writer, and essayist. Her most recent novel is The Capital of Dreams. Her previous works include When We Lost Our Heads, which was a #1 national bestseller and a finalist for the Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal; The Lonely Hearts Hotel, which won the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and CBC’s Canada Reads; and Lullabies for Little Criminals, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, and Daydreams of Angels, which were shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Orange Prize for Fiction, and the Scotiabank Giller Prize two years in a row. O‘Neill has also won CBC’s Canada Reads and the Danuta Gleed Award. Born and raised in Montreal, she lives there today.
SARA POWER is a storyteller from Labrador and a former artillery officer in the Canadian Forces. She completed a Master of Fine Arts in Creative writing at the University of British Columbia. Her writing has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies including Best Canadian Stories 2024. She was a finalist for the RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award and received a National Magazine Award nomination in the fiction category. Sara’s fiction has won awards from The Malahat Review and Riddle Fence, and has been a finalist at The Toronto Star, The New Quarterly, Prairie Fire, and Fiddlehead. Sara’s first book, Art of Camouflage, was the finalist for the 2024 BMO Winterset award for fiction; it is a collection of stories featuring a cast of girls and women caught in the military’s orbit. Originally from Labrador, Sara now lives in Ottawa.
SUSIE TAYLOR is an art school grad and former retail worker. The year she turned 40, she quit smoking and started writing. Taylor is the author of two books, Vigil and Even Weirder Than Before. Her short stories have appeared in several literary magazines including Geist, PRISM International, The Fiddlehead, and Room Magazine. Her book Vigil was the winner of the 2024 BMO Winterset Award for Fiction. Vigil also won the Alistair MacLeod Award for Short Fiction and was a finalist for The Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award. Taylor is the associate fiction editor at Riddle Fence Magazine and lives in Harbour Grace, NL.
AARON TUCKER is the author of seven books, including the novels Soldiers, Hunters Not Cowboys and Y: Oppenheimer, Horseman of Los Alamos (both with Coach House Books). Hispoetry and new media work engaging with machine translation and 3D printing has been shown across Canada, and in the United States, Norway, and Brazil. His scholarly work on facial recognition technologies won the Governor General’s Gold Medal and his work on writing on artificial intelligence has been widely published in North America. He is currently an Assistant Professor at Memorial University in St John’s, Newfoundland, teaching Creative Writing and Communication and Media Studies.
JANE URQUHART, O.C., is one of Canada’s best loved writers and has been nominated for the world’s leading literary prizes including the Booker Prize, the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Orange Prize. The Stone Carvers was a finalist for the Giller Prize and The Underpainter won the Governor General’s Award.
ELEANOR WACHTEL loves books and their authors and has managed to garner her view by sharing that passion. Five books of her interviews have been published, including Random Illuminations, a collection of reflections, correspondence, and conversations with Carol Shields; Original Minds; and for the show’s twenty-fifth anniversary, The Best of Writers & Company. Last year she chaired the jury of the International Booker Prize.
JACK WHALEN is the son, brother, husband, and father whose story became a book, Invisible Prisons. Co-authored with Lisa Moore, his book won the 2024 BMO Winterset award for non-fiction. He divides his time between family homes in Oshawa, Ontario, and St. John’s, Newfoundland. Recently, he can sometimes be found crossing the country in a truck carrying a replica of the cell in which he was once imprisoned, seeking justice for those who endured solitary confinement as children.
Festival passes: $175
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