George F. Walker is one of Canada’s most prolific and popular playwrights. He has written more than twenty plays and has created screenplays for several award-winning Canadian TV series.
During a ten-year absence, he mainly wrote for television, including the television series Due South, The Newsroom, This Is Wonderland, and The Line, as well as for the film Niagara Motel (based on three plays from his Suburban Motel series). Walker returned to the theater with And So It Goes (2010). Since that time he has published King of Thieves (2013); Dead Metaphor (2015, a series of three plays that include Dead Metaphor, The Ravine, and The Burden of Self Awareness); and Moss Park and Tough! The Bobby and Tina Plays (2015). After Class, a series of plays that address education and parenting, will be published in 2017.
Awards and honours include investiture as a Member of the Order of Canada (2005); National Theatre School Gascon-Thomas Award (2002); two Governor General’s Literary Awards for Drama (for Criminals in Love and Nothing Sacred); five Dora Mavor Moore Awards; and eight Chalmers Canadian Play Awards.
Chris Johnson is a professor of English literature, specialing in Canadian drama and theatre, at the University of Manitoba. He recently co-directed Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead with Margaret Groome for Stoppardfest 2007. Johnson was one of the first writers to bring the work of George F. Walker to critical attention, and he continues to write and give papers on Walker and dark comedy in Canadian drama.