Award-winning and prolific playwright, director, and novelist Don Hannah will give a public reading at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, Feb. 15, in the UPEI Faculty Lounge, Main Building.

The east coast has long been a focus in the Shediac, NB native’s work. His new novel, Ragged Islands begins in September 2001as 85-year-old Susan Ann Roberts lies dying in a Toronto hospital. Susan resolves to return to the places in the Maritimes that defined her as a girl, wife, and mother. She begins her magical journey at the family farm where she spent childhood summers and 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.

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

Hannah’s 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.  

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 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 part of the Winter’s Tales series sponsored by the UPEI Department of English with support from the Canada Council of the Arts.