Joel Thomas Hynes

Joel Thomas Hynes has won various awards for writing in different media. His novels Down to the Dirt (2005) and Right Away Monday (2007) have been published to widespread national and international acclaim by Harper Collins Canada. He co-wrote the celebrated stageplay The Devil You Don’t Know and Say Nothing Saw Wood, which was produced by St. John’s RCA Theatre Co in 2007 and won the NL Arts and Letters Award for Best Dramatic Script. Also an actor, Hynes has performed numerous leading roles for stage, film and television. He was a contributing writer and played a leading role in the CBC’s Hatching, Matching and Dispatching, and in 2007 performed in The Movie Network’s Re-Genesis, Newfound Film’s Ashore and Heartless Disappearance Into Labrador Seas and played the lead role in the feature film adaptation of his novel Down to the Dirt. Hynes is a recipient of the Lawrence Jackson Creative Writing Award and was named the Newfoundland and Labrador Art’s Council’s Artist of the Year. His novel, We’ll All Be Burnt in Our Beds Some Night, won the 2017 Governor General’s Literary Award for English language fiction and was also included on the long list for the 2017 Scotiabank Giller Prize as well as the winner for the BMO Winterset Award. Hynes has worked in the Canadian film and television industry for more than fifteen years as a writer, actor and director. He’s written and directed two award-winning short films, Clipper Gold and Little Man. His screen adaptation of his book Say Nothing Saw Wood under the title Cast No Shadow, was nominated for four 2015 Canadian Screen Awards including Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Motion Picture.In 2014 he won the Best Atlantic Screenwriter Award from the Atlantic Film Festival for Cast Now Shadow, in which he also costarred.

Also see: Wildhood, Nova Scotia.