Donna Morrissey

Donna Morrissey is originally from The Beaches in Newfoundland. Donna left this small outport on the west coast of the island when she was sixteen. She studied at Memorial University in St. John's and lived in various parts of Canada before settling down in Halifax, where she now lives.

Donna Morrissey's best selling, award winning novel, Kit's Law, has been translated into Japanese, German and Dutch. Her two screenplays have won the Atlantic Film Scriptwriting Competition two years in succession, with one of her scripts, Clothesline Patch, filmed and aired on CBC. Clothesline Patch was nominated for two Geminis Awards, Best Writing in a Dramatic Series and Best Production, which it won. Her second novel, Downhill Chance, won the 2003 Thomas Head Raddall Award for Fiction, and Sylvanis Now won the Raddall and the Booksellers' Choice Award. What They Wanted, a sequal to Sylvanus Now, was released in Fall 2008.

For more information, please visit her website at donnamorrissey.com

Selected List of Publications

What They Wanted. Penguin, 2008, ISBN 978-0670044788

Sylvanus Now. Penguin Canada, 2005. ISBN 0143014250.
      Winner of the 2006 Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Prize
      Winner of Bookseller's Choice Award
      Shortlisted for The Commonwealth Award

"From the verisimilitude with which she depicts life in the outports to the note-perfect dialogue to the rich and colloquial narrative voice, Morrissey rarely falters....Sylvanus Now is a powerful, moving evocation of lives and times ...brought vividly back to life in Morrissey's caring hands."
     -Quill & Quire

Downhill Chance. Penguin Canada, 2002. ISBN 0143033603. US: Houghton Mifflin. UK: Hodder and Stoughton.
     Winner of the 2003 Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Prize.
     Click here to read WFNS' description of this book.

"Set in the bleak years during and after the Second World War, the narrative revolves around two families, the Osmonds and Gales, both burdened by scars and sorrows and secrets -- terrible, unspeakable secrets."
     - Penguin Books Canada

"Her work stands outside her own university-educated life and current living space in Halifax, in much the same way as Thomas Hardy sustained Wessex into the 20th century or Faulkner carried Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, with him to Los Angeles. The comparison to Hardy is the more apt, because the people who populate Morrissey's imagined seaside villages are Old World in their attitudes and un-Americanized in everything except their moonshine and the campfire locales of their drinking sprees."
     - "A Newfoundland Thomas Hardy," review by T. F. Rigelhof, The Globe and Mail, D8, March 30, 2002.

"Grieving Nan." Atlantica: Stories from the Maritimes and Newfoundland. Lesley Choyce, Editor. Goose Lane Editions, 2001. ISBN 0-8692-309-0.
     Click here for WFNS' description of this book.

"Morrissey's prose, threaded with echoes of Shakespeare, Carl Jung, and Joseph Campbell, is a perfect fit for her almost mythical story of fractured families, wars, and homecomings."
     - Quill & Quire

Kit's Law. Penguin Canada, 1999. ISBN 067088601-7.

Click here for WFNS' description of this book.
     Shortlisted for the 2000 Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award.
     Winner of the Libris, First Time Author of the Year Award
     Winifred Holtby Prize in England which recognizes the best in regional fiction
     Shortlisted for the Chapters First Novel Award

"There's a sense in Donna Morrissey's writing that William Faulkner has met Annie Proulx."
      - Atlantic Books Today, number 26, Fall 1999.

"The strength of Morrissey's novel lies in the true voices of her characters, the strong story line and the vitality of the setting and the people. Morrissey's story is multi-layered. ... Kit's Law is a stunning debut novel from a very talented writer."
      - Lynn Barter, The Telegram, November 7, 1999.

You can send mail to Donna Morrissey
c/o Writers' Federation of Nova Scotia