Award-winning playwright and novelist Don Hannah gives reading at UPEI February 15

Award-winning playwright Don Hannah will give a public reading at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, February 15, in the Main Building Faculty Lounge, University of Prince Edward Island.

Born in Shediac, N.B., Hannah is also a prolific director and novelist. The East Coast has long been a focus in his work. His first plays, The Wedding Script (winner of the Chalmers Award), Rubber Dolly and In the Lobster Capital of the World, were produced at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre. The Wooden Hill, based on the journals of L.M. Montgomery, won the AT&T OnStage Award. In 2002, Hannah was nominated for the prestigious Simonovitch Prize for Outstanding Playwright.

Of The Wise and Foolish Virgins, his first novel, The Globe and Mail writes, “Hannah's novel uses sprawling energy and a dozen colourful characters to break the pattern of ‘dour’ and ‘morose’ Maritime fiction.”

In his new novel, Ragged Islands, it is September 2001, and eighty-five-year-old Susan Ann Roberts lies dying in a Toronto hospital, when she resolves to return to the places in the Maritimes that defined her as a girl, wife, and mother. Her children are at her bedside, but her dearest grandson Tommy is stuck in New York, where something dreadful is happening. Susan begins her magical journey at the family farm where she spent childhood summers. She then travels to Ragged Islands, N.S., and the house she shared with her husband – pondering why she was given away to relatives at birth, when siblings born earlier and later were kept.

Hannah has been writer-in-residence at the Tarragon and Canadian Stage theatres, the University of New Brunswick, and for the Yukon Library System. He is a founding member of the Playwrights Atlantic Resource Centre and, for the last eight years, has directed the Tarragon Theatre’s Young Playwrights Unit. He is associate program dramaturge for the Banff PlayRites Colony, and works in the playwriting department at the National Theatre School of Canada.

Hannah’s reading is sponsored by the UPEI English Department, with support from the Canada Council for the Arts.