Bernice Morgan
Bernice Morgan is available for visits to high schools in the St. John's area.
Biography
Fiction writer Bernice Morgan was born, and still lives, in St.
John’s, Newfoundland. She has worked as a columnist, book
reviewer, editor and in public relations. However, she is best
known as the author of Random Passage and Waiting For Time; books on which an eight-part television series was produced in
2001. Both novels were published by Breakwater Books. Random Passage, a national bestseller, was republished in Ireland and was
nominated for Ireland’s IMPACT Award. Translations of the
book have been published in French and German.
Waiting For Time, the sequel to Random Passage, won both the Canadian Author’s Award for Fiction and the Thomas H. Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award for 1994. The Topography of Love, a
collection of short stories revolving around life in wartime St.
John’s, was published by Breakwater in 2000, has also been
republished in Germany and was short-listed for the Winterset Award.
Cloud of Bone, her most recent
novel, was published by Random House in 2007. It won the 2007/08
Newfoundland and Labrador Book Award as well as the Heritage and
History Book Award from the Newfoundland and Labrador Historic Sites
Association and was one of three books short-listed for the 2008
Atlantic Fiction Award.
Bernice's work is included in anthologies and in several
textbooks. She has served on community-based committees including
the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council, the Newfoundland and
Labrador Arts and Letters Committee, the editorial board of
Killick Press and as executive member of both the Newfoundland
and Labrador Writers Alliance and the Newfoundland Writers
Guild. She has been a judge for provincial and national
literary awards, given workshops on writing and acted as mentor at the
Banff School for the Arts.
Bernice has also been guest reader at festivals, conferences, workshops
and
high schools in every province of Canada and in the Northwest
Territories. She has read at many Canadian universities
and universities in Birmingham, London and Dublin. She has
been a guest
reader at The Vancouver International Writers Festival, at Harbourfront
in Toronto, at ‘Word on The Street’ in Halifax and at the
National Library in Ottawa.
In 1996 Bernice Morgan was named ‘Artist of the Year’ by
the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council and in 1998 was award an
honourary degree by Memorial University of Newfoundland. In 2003
she was a recipient of the Queen’s Golden Jubilee Medal.
School Visits
Bernice is available to talk to high school English
classes, history or social studies classes. She will read from her
work and talk about the writing process, the development of
character and the importance of setting in writing fiction. She also talks
about the history of settlement in Newfoundland and answers students'
questions.
Because Bernice would like to be able to interact with discussion and
questions, she prefers class-sized groups. If classes are
combined, a school library or resource centre is an acceptable venue.
Very large groups are counter-productive.
Preparation
It’s always preferable if the students have some
familiarity with the author’s work, however, Bernice has had
lively discussions regarding subjects such as early settlement in
Newfoundland and the disappearance of the Beothuks with students who
have not yet read her books.
To book Bernice and for information about the Newfoundland and Labardor Arts Council's Visiting Artist Program funding
go to our main page.