Harold Horwood

Horwood, Harold Andrew

Harold Andrew Horwood, columnist, union organizer, politician, editor, novelist (b at St John's 2 Nov 1923; d at Annapolis Royal 16 April 2006). A union organizer and politician during the late 1940s and early 1950s, Horwood supported J.R. SMALLWOOD in the campaign which brought Newfoundland into Confederation. He then represented Labrador in the House of Assembly, 1949-51.

Horwood joined the staff of the St John's Evening Telegram in 1952 and was associated with that daily in various capacities until 1970, during which time he was often a fierce critic of Premier Smallwood's policies. Horwood relinquished his editorial responsibilities with the Telegram in 1958 and began what was to be a very successful writing career. His fiction is best represented by 2 novels - Tomorrow Will Be Sunday (1966), and White Eskimo (1972). Foxes of Beachy Cove (1967), a thoughtful little book on the back-to-nature theme, won the Best Scientific Book of the Year citation in 1968; his non-fiction studies also include the biographies Bartlett, the Great Canadian Explorer (1977) - "Canadian" was correctly omitted from the title of the second edition, 1980 - and Joey (1989).

Horwood was Writer-in-Residence at the University of Western Ontario (1976-77) and at the University of Waterloo (1980-83), where he was founding editor of the literary magazine The New Quarterly. He was a founding member and one-time chairman of the Writers' Union of Canada and was awarded the Order of Canada, in 1980, for his contributions to Canadian literature. He has been living in Nova Scotia since 1977. He published his autobiography A Walk in the Dream Time: Growing Up in Old St John's in 1997.