ANGELA ANTLE is a writer, artist, and documentary maker based in St. John’s, Newfoundland and is the winner of the 2025 BMO Winterset Award. Antle’s writing has appeared in Riddle Fence, Newfoundland Quarterly, and CBC.ca. She wrote and directed Gander’s Ripple Effect: How a Small Town’s Kindness Opened on Broadway and wrote the feature-length Irish-Norwegian-Canadian documentary Atlantic: What Lies Beneath. As a journalist, Angela has rowed a dory through the Narrows, covered the subculture of Florida’s Spring Break, taken bumpy komatik rides on the coast of Labrador, hitchhiked from France to Newfoundland on a fishing boat, interviewed a Prime Minister on Broadway, and recorded Ron Hynes singing “Sonny’s Dream” in Ireland. She is an interdisciplinary PhD candidate at Memorial University, a member of Norway’s Empowered Futures Energy School, and was the 2025 Rachel Carson Writer in Residence at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.
SHARON BALA is the author of the bestselling The Boat People, which won the 2020 Newfoundland and Labrador Book Award and the 2019 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction. It was a finalist for Canada Reads 2018, the 2018 Amazon Canada First Novel Award, the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award, the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award, and was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award and the Aspen Words Literary Prize. Her short fiction has won three Newfoundland and Labrador Arts and Letters Awards and has been published in leading literary magazines including The Journey Prize 29 and Riddle Fence. Sharon earned the 2017 CBC Emerging Artist Award. She is a member of The Port Authority, a St. John’s writing group. Sharon holds a BA (Honours) in Psychology and History from Queen’s University and an MA in History from the University of Toronto. She lives on the island of Ktaqmkuk (Newfoundland), which is the unceded, traditional territory of the Beothuk and the Mi’kmaq, with her husband, Tom Baird. Visit her online at: sharonbala.com.
HEATHER BARRETT is an author, international award-winning broadcaster and retired journalist from St. John’s, where she hosted the popular CBC Weekend AM radio program. Her interests in history, fibre crafts, and sharing a good story led her to this recent project examining the lives of young, single Newfoundland and Labrador women in the 1940s who took industrial jobs and settled in southern Ontario’s Cambridge area. A proud Newfoundlander, runner, and community volunteer, Heather spends her free time knitting and enjoying her province’s beautiful outdoors. She holds a Bachelor of Music from Memorial University of Newfoundland and a Master of Arts in Journalism from Western University.
DAVID BERGEN Praised by the Montreal Gazette as “one of Canada’s best writers” and by The Globe and Mail as “brilliant and utterly convincing,” David Bergen is the bestselling author of twelve novels and two collections of short fiction, and well-known as a writer “operating at the highest level of his craft.” Among his most acclaimed works are The Time in Between, a national bestseller; The Age of Hope, a finalist for Canada Reads; and Out of Mind, a follow up to The Matter with Morris. He has won the McNally Robinson Book of the Year five times, and his writing has also been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and a Pushcart Prize. In 2018 Bergen was presented with the Writer’s Trust Matt Cohen Award: In Celebration of a Writing Live. He lives in Winnipeg.
TED BLADES is a retired journalist who was the longest-serving host of CBC Radio’s afternoon show, On The Go. He’s a three-time finalist at the New York Festivals International Radio Competition, the Gold Medal winner in 2015 for best interview and the winner of the inaugural Atlantic Journalism Award for best podcast in 2017. This is his third appearance at Winterset in Summer.
BILL BRENNAN’S expertise as a pianist, percussionist, composer and producer can be heard on some 140 albums to date. His album Kaleidoscope – Music for Mallet Instruments won the 2024 ECMA and MusicNL Classical Album of the Year awards. Tom Allen of CBC Radio’s It’s About Time writes, “Bill Brennan’s Kaleidoscope is perfectly named – a constantly shifting, twirling, entrancing and enchanting swirl of beauty and fascination.” Bill’s most recent album is “Dreaming in Gamelan”, a project with co-composer Andy McNeill. In 2025 he won his first Juno as orchestrator of Deantha Edmunds’ piece “Angmalukisaa”. More than 40 years of relentless experience have garnered Brennan a solid reputation as a performer, composer and arranger of contemporary classical, jazz, folk and world music — always exploring, always open to new ideas, Brennan’s talents resist classification. The Toronto Star says: “Brennan … is a central figure in this country’s music.”
NIAMH CAMPBELL is a writer from Dublin, Ireland, based in County Clare. She is the author of This Happy (2020), We Were Young (2022) and Make Strange (2026). In 2021 she won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. She teaches creative writing at University College Dublin.
ANN Y.K. CHOI, originally from Chung-Ju, South Korea, is a Toronto-based author and educator. Her novel, Kay’s Lucky Coin Variety, was shortlisted for the Toronto Book Award. In 2017, Choi was honoured by the Korean Canadian Heritage Awards committee and awarded with the Culture Award for promoting Korean heritage within Canada. Choi currently serves on the program advisory committee for gritLIT, Hamilton’s literary festival, mentors emerging writers in a group she founded called Writers in Trees, and teaches Creative Writing at the University of Toronto, School of Continuing Studies. Her second novel All Things Under the Moon was published in 2025.
MICHAEL CRUMMEY is the author of thirteen books of fiction and poetry. His latest novel, The Adversary, was the winner of the 2025 International Dublin Literary Award. Considered “one of North America’s finest novelists” (The Washington Post), his work has been published in a dozen countries and has won or been nominated for many Canadian and international awards, including the Giller Prize, the Governor-General’s Award, the Commonwealth Prize, and the Winterset Award.
RAMONA DEARING’s short fiction collection, So Beautiful, was shortlisted for the BMO Winterset Award and the Danuta Gleed Literary Award. Her work has been included in several editions of Best Canadian Stories. She 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.
DR. NOREEN GOLFMAN was honoured with the title Professor Emerita, having taught English literature and film studies at Memorial University of Newfoundland before becoming associate then dean of the School of Graduate Studies. From there she was appointed Provost and Vice President (Academic). ACTRA awarded her “Woman of the Year” in 2019. In 2023 she was invested into the Order of Newfoundland and Labrador and in 2025 Memorial University awarded her an Honorary Doctorate. Noreen was a freelance broadcaster, commentator, and film reviewer for CBC Radio and TV. She was the founding director of the St. John’s International Women’s Film Festival (1989) and chaired the board of the festival for thirty years. She’s been the president of the MUN Cinema Series for about 38 years, is Vice Chair of PictureNL, and co-chair of Business and Arts NL. She chaired the board of Friends of Canadian Broadcasting for 28 years. For several years she helmed the board of the wonderful Winterset in Summer Literary Festival to which she remains devoted.
JENNIFER GUY has been involved with Winterset in Summer for over two decades. She was a founding board member from the festival’s inception in 2001 through to 2018. She was also part of the small team of women who worked with Richard Gwyn in Toronto in 2000 to raise funds for the Winterset Awards, now the BMO Winterset Awards. She is thrilled to see the growth and success of the award and the festival as a forum to celebrate and nurture literary arts in Newfoundland and Labrador, and she is delighted to host the workshop writers’ panel for the third time running.
AL HENDERSON is a jazz bassist and composer. He has previously appeared at the 2019 Winterset Festival at the Gander Airport and in 2025. The Eastport area has inspired several of his jazz compositions such as Happy Adventure, Sandy Cove and ‘Round the Bay. You can hear samples of his music with his groups: Al Henderson Quartet/Quintet/Septet and Time Warp (an iconic quartet in Canadian jazz) on his website alhenderson.ca and on YouTube (Cornerstone Records Inc.). Al has received multiple JUNO nominations and awards for his work including the Jazz Report Composer of the Year and the prestigious SOCAN Award for Original Jazz Composition for the large work Ellingtonia both in 1995 and the Canadian Independent Music Award for Jazz Album of the Year in 2003. Al is an Associate Professor of Music at York University in Toronto.
HOLLY HOGAN is a writer and seabird biologist. During her decades as a scientist, she has spent over a thousand days at sea conducting marine wildlife surveys and providing educational programming with expedition teams. Her work has taken her from the Arctic to the Antarctic Oceans, and every latitude in between. She appears in a National Film Board series called Ocean School and provided expertise on seabirds and the impact of marine plastic for the award-winning documentary Hell or Clean Water (2021). Her book Message in a Bottle: Ocean Dispatches from a Seabird Biologist won the 2023 BMO Winterset Award and was a finalist for the 2023 Science Writers and Communicators of Canada Book Award as well as the 2023 Governor-General’s Award for non-fiction. She lives in St. John’s.
WAYNE JOHNSTON was born and raised in Goulds, Newfoundland. His #1 nationally bestselling novels include First Snow, Last Light; The Custodian of Paradise; The Navigator of New York; and The Colony of Unrequited Dreams. Baltimore’s Mansion won the inaugural Charles Taylor Prize for literary non-fiction. The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, published in 1998, was nominated for sixteen national and international awards including the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, and was a Canada Reads finalist. In 2011, Johnston was awarded the Writers’ Trust Engel/Findley Award honouring the work of a writer in mid-career. His memoir Jennie’s Boy won the 2023 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Literary Humour and was also a Canada Reads finalist, in 2025.
ELISABETH DE MARIAFFI is the critically acclaimed author of four books: the Giller Prize-nominated short story collection How to Get Along with Women and the thrillers The Devil You Know, Hysteria, and most recently, The Retreat, which won the 2022 NLBA Fiction Prize. Both Devil and Hysteria were named Globe and Mail Best Books and National Post Top 100 of the Year, and both were shortlisted for the prestigious Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award, while The Devil You Know was also longlisted for the 2017 International Dublin Literary Award— and optioned immediately after publication. De Mariaffi has taught fiction and screenwriting at UBC, Memorial University and through the Humber School for Writers. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph and is currently on faculty in the MFA (Fiction) program at the University of Kings College in Halifax.
DEBBIE MCGEE made her first film in Vancouver in 1983, and her last film in St. John’s in 2013. In between those markers, she worked as a writer and director of short dramas and nfb documentaries before joining the Media Unit at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador as Producer / Director. She has been an active volunteer with arts organizations throughout her career, serving on many boards, juries, and councils. She lives in St. John’s. Her films and awards are available for viewing on her website: debbiemcgee.ca.
LISA MOORE has written three collections of short stories, Degrees of Nakedness, Open, and Something for Everyone, andfour novels, Alligator, February, Caught and This Is How We Love along with Flannery, a young adult novel. Lisa wrote a stage play based on her novel February and is a co-librettist with composer Laura Kaminsky for the opera based on February. With Jack Whalen, Lisa co-wrote the creative nonfiction book Invisible Prisons, which was short-listed for the Hilary Weston Prize in 2024 and won both the BMO Winterset Award for Nonfiction and the Newfoundland and Labrador Book Prize for Non-Fiction. Lisa is currently writing for stage and screen and finishing a young adult novel, The Spellbound. Lisa studied conceptual art at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and is a professor teaching Creative Writing at Memorial University of Newfoundland.
TRUDY MORGAN-COLE won the brand new flash fiction contest by Winterset in Summer Literary Festival and Riddle Fence! Trudy is a novelist from St. John’s. She has written several works of historical fiction focusing on the experiences of Newfoundland women, including By the Rivers of Brooklyn, That Forgetful Shore, A Sudden Sun, Most Anything You Please, and the Cupids Trilogy. In addition to writing novels, Trudy dabbles in short fiction, playwriting, podcasting, and audio drama. Her new novel, Beyond the Brightening Sea, will be released in Fall 2026.
MACKENZIE NOLAN was born and raised in Newfoundland. Working professionally as a social worker for several years, she found herself better suited to writing interpersonal dynamics, rather than solving them. She lives in St. John’s, NL. Veal is the first novel in her two-book deal with ECW Press.
BRITTANY PENNER is an author, practicing family physician and lecturer with the University of Manitoba Max Rady College of Medicine, and has been a keynote speaker at the University of Manitoba. She is currently completing a Master’s of Liberal Arts at Harvard University. Her personal essays have appeared in Salon, The Globe and Mail, Maclean’s, Huffington Post Canada, This Magazine and Canadian Family Physician, and typically revolve around the complex nature of identity and family dynamics. She lives in Manitoba.
WILLIAM PING is a novelist and journalist, born and raised in St. John’s. His debut novel Hollow Bamboo was published by HarperCollins in 2023 and was shortlisted for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, the BMO Winterset Award, and the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award as well as being longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award, the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, and the Newfoundland and Labrador Book Award. He has previously been published in ‘Us, Now,’ Hard Ticket and Riddle Fence. William is also known for his contributions to CBC News, where he currently is a producer of Here and Now.
MICHELLE PORTER writes poetry, fiction and nonfiction. She is the descendent of a long line of Métis storytellers (the Goulet family) originally from the Red River area. Her first novel, A Grandmother Begins the Story (2023), won the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award and was shortlisted for the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. She’s the author of two nonfiction books, Approaching Fire and Scratching River, and one book of poetry, Inquiries. Her next novel A Glacier’s Guide to Dying is due to be published in the fall of 2026.
SUSIE TAYLOR is a queer writer who lives in Harbour Grace, Newfoundland. 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 (Breakwater Books). Her short stories have appeared in literary magazines across Canada including Geist, PRISM International, The Fiddlehead, and Room Magazine. In 2015, she was the winner of the NLCU Fresh Fish Award for Emerging Writers. Her book Vigil was the winner of the 2024 BMO Winterset Award for Fiction and the Alistair MacLeod Award for Short Fiction. It was a finalist for the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award. Taylor is the associate fiction editor at Riddle Fence Magazine.
SOUVANKHAM THAMMAVONGSA is the author of four poetry books and the short story collection, How to Pronounce Knife, winner of the 2020 Giller Prize and 2021 Trillium Book Award. Her stories have won an O. Henry Prize and appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and Granta. Pick a Colour is her first novel
MADELEINE THIEN is the author of the story collection Simple Recipes (2001) and three previous novels: Certainty (2006), Dogs at the Perimeter (2011) and Do Not Say We Have Nothing (2016). Do Not Say We Have Nothing was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Folio Prize, and won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, among other honours. Her books have been translated into twenty-five languages, and her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, the Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books and elsewhere. As a librettist, she created Chinatown, a full-length opera by Alice Ping Yee Ho and Paul Yee, and collaborates on a range of chamber works. In 2024, she received the Writers’ Trust Engel Findley Award, honouring a writer in mid-career. Madeline lives in Montreal and teaches Creative Writing at the City University of New York.
ELEANOR WACHTEL When writer and broadcaster Eleanor Wachtel wrapped up CBC Radio’s Writers and Company after thirty-three seasons, she was determined to have a digital archive of the show —more than a thousand original episodes— freely available to anyone, anywhere in the world. Now, it’s all there, the complete collection, in partnership with SFU Library: https://digital.lib.sfu.ca/writers-company
KARL WELLS has been a broadcaster in Newfoundland and Labrador media since he first spoke into a live microphone on VOWR at age 16. His professional career began in 1974 at the CBC, where for 32 years he perfected his skills in hosting, performing, newscasting, and interviewing. He appeared on multiple radio and TV programs including the flagship news program, Here and Now, during which his dynamic on-location weather and community broadcasts made him a much-loved personality throughout the province. Since leaving the CBC Karl has pursued writing, with a 14-year stint as a weekly restaurant and food columnist, for which he received the Canadian Culinary Federation Sandy Sanderson Award.
IAN WILLIAMS is the author of eight acclaimed books of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, including Reproduction, which won the Giller Prize. His most recent novel is You’ve Changed, selected as a best book of the year by CBC and Globe and Mail. He delivered the 2024 CBC Massey Lectures, What I Mean to Say, about rehabilitating conversations in divisive times. His short story collection, Not Anyone’s Anything, won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for the best first collection of short fiction in Canada. Williams is a professor at the University of Toronto, where he directs the Creative Writing program. He is a trustee for the Griffin Poetry Prize.
ANGELA ANTLE is a writer, artist, and documentary maker based in St. John’s, Newfoundland and is the winner of the 2025 BMO Winterset Award. Antle’s writing has appeared in Riddle
