One of Canada’s best-known and most celebrated writers of nonfiction will be this year’s HarperCollins Canada Writer-in-Residence at the University of King’s College MFA in Creative Nonfiction summer residency in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Charlotte Gray is the multi-award-winning author of nine bestselling books of biography and historical nonfiction, including her most recent, The Massey Murder: A Maid, Her Master and the Trial that Shocked a Country (HarperCollins Canada 2013), a true crime story about the century-old murder of a member of one of Canada’s wealthiest families.
The book — which was both a Globe and Mail and also an Amazon.ca Top 100 Book of the Year — won the Arthur Ellis Award for the Best Nonfiction Crime Book, the Toronto Book Award, the Heritage Toronto Book Award and the Canadian Authors Association Lela Common Award for Canadian History. It was shortlisted for the Libris Award as Canada’s Nonfiction Book of the Year, the Charles Taylor Award for Nonfiction, the Evergreen Award and the Ottawa Book Award for Nonfiction.
Gray’s 2006 biography of Alexander Graham Bell, Reluctant Genius, partly set in Nova Scotia, is currently in development as a Canada-UK television mini-series.
Gray, who has honorary doctorates from five Canadian universities, including Mount Saint Vincent, won the 2003 Pierre Berton Award for Distinguished Achievement in Popularizing Canadian History and is currently an Adjunct Research Professor in the Department of History at Carleton University in Ottawa.
During the MFA residency (July 31-August 13), Gray will conduct master classes in nonfiction and meet one-to-one with students in the program, as well as give a public lecture.
The Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction degree — a joint offering of the University of King’s College’s School of Journalism and Dalhousie University’s Faculty of Graduate Studies — is the only program of its kind in Canada. During the two-year limited residency degree, students attend two intense summer residencies in Halifax. They also travel to Toronto and New York on alternating years for publishing-focused winter residencies, and they work one-to-one with professional writer-mentors to develop their own book proposals and projects.
The program is currently accepting applications for summer 2016. A limited number of student bursaries are available for new students. You can find more information about the program here.
