Canadian sf author Edward Willett has been named writer-in-residence at the Regina Public Library, for a nine-month period running from 1 September into May 2012.
Willett tells us the paid position will allow him “to spend 70 percent of my time on my own writing projects and 30 percent on my writer-in-residence duties, which include meeting with local writers and conducting workshops and readings at the library and in schools.”
Willett will be the 24th writer-in-residence since RPL became the first public library in Canada to offer such a program in 1978.
Willett’s science fiction and fantasy novels include Marseguro, winner of the Aurora Award for Best Long-Form Work in English in 2009, and its sequel, Terra Insegura, both published by DAW Books. His latest novel is Song of the Sword, a YA fantasy, the first installment of the five-book Shards of Excalibur series, published by Lobster Press in Montreal. His first adult fantasy novel, Magebane, will be published by DAW this fall under the pen name Lee Arthur Chane.
Willett is also the author of numerous non-fiction books for both adults and children, covering topics as diverse as the Iran-Iraq war, the mutiny on the Bounty, and the lives of Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Johnny Cash. Among his children’s books are biographies of J.R.R. Tolkien and Orson Scott Card, published by Enslow Publishers.