Bio – Gerard Collins
Gerard Collins is a Newfoundland writer, now living in New Brunswick, whose first novel, Finton Moon, was nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award, Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, the Newfoundland and Labrador Heritage and History Award, and has won the Percy Janes First Novel Award. In 2019, he turned the Finton Moon experience into a multi-media art exhibition, “The Book that Wrote Itself”. His short story collection, Moonlight Sketches, won the 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 more than two decades and an occasional lecturer at University of New Brunswick, Gerard has a Ph.D. in American (Gothic) literature, which derives from a lifelong fascination with shadow lives and unrequited promise. He is an experienced leader of writing retreats and workshops in Canada, the United States, and Europe. Gerard has been a featured workshop leader with the Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick, Writers’ Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador, the prestigious Piper’s Frith in Newfoundland, and Lily Daly Assembly in New York. He has read at numerous literary festivals and most recently represented the province of New Brunswick at the Louisiana Book Festival in Baton Rouge where he was invited to read and present a workshop. He’s also lectured Masters in Creative Writing students at Newcastle University, UK and delivered a reading at the Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts. In 2021, Gerard was invited by the Frye Festival to teach a Masterclass in creative writing.
Gerard regularly serves on juries of writing and granting competitions while mentoring writers who show great promise, and all three of his books have been placed in libraries around the world. Gerard lives in Belleisle Creek with his partner Jane Simpson and is now writing Wolf of Inis Mór, part of his forthcoming Thresholds fantasy series.
