Donna Morrissey

Donna Morrissey (born in 1956 at The Beaches, Newfoundland) is a Canadian author.

At age 16 Morrissey left her birthplace, The Beaches, a small outport on the west coast of Newfoundland. She lived in various places of Canada before returning to St. John's where she studied at Memorial University, where she obtained a Bachelor of Social Work, and a diploma in adult education. Morrissey now lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Morrissey has written three prize-winning novels — Kit's Law, the national best seller Downhill Chance, and Sylvanus Now — as well as one prize-winning screenplay.

Morrissey defended Frank Parker Day's novel Rockbound in Canada Reads 2005. Rockbound eventually won the competition. In the 2007 edition of Canada Reads, an "all-star" competition pitting the five winning advocates from previous years against each other, Morrissey returned to champion Anosh Irani's novel The Song of Kahunsha.

As most young people do, Morrissey left The Beaches. At sixteen, having flunked out of high school, she set off travelling that vast expanse of country to the west. “I was like, ‘Jesus, I want to see a hippie! And I want to smoke pot, and I want to do all of that stuff and travel the world.’ I didn’t do the world so much, but I certainly traipsed through this country a few times.”

For ten years, Morrissey moved from province to province, working as a waitress, a bartender, a cook on an oilrig. She got married and had two children (a son, now twenty-six, and a daughter, now nineteen). And when she tired of life “abroad,” she brought her family back to Newfoundland and worked splitting cod at a fish processing plant.