Kathleen Winter was born in the industrial northeast of England and moved to Newfoundland as a child. For many years, she was best known for her weekly column in the St. John’s Telegram She has also written for television—everything from CBC documentaries to live–action segments and songs for Sesame Street.
Her first book, the vivid story collection, boYs, won the prestigious Metcalf-Rooke Award and the 2008 Winterset Award for Excellence in Newfoundland Writing. Her prose is a “mesmerizing combination of crisp, brilliant language, a fine attention to detail, a deep empathy for her well–wrought characters, and an aphoristic, intelligent, world-savvy wisdom,” says Laura Repas in Salty Ink.
Kathleen’s eagerly awaited novel, Annabel, tells the story of a hermaphrodite child born in the hyper-male hunting culture of Labrador during the 1960s. Surgically altered at birth, he is given the name Wayne and sent out to the brutal trap line with his father. But as Wayne grows to adulthood he believes there is another self hidden in his body—a girl he thinks of as “Annabel”—who is secretly nurtured by the women in his life.
“This book is inspired by a true story an acquaintance came and told me in my kitchen. The story haunted me, because it is a story about what maleness and femaleness are,” Kathleen says. “I wrote the book to explore these questions, and to write into the beauty and loneliness I feel exist not only in a person like Annabel…but in each of us.”
Kathleen lives in Montreal with her husband and daughters.
