Category: Fiction

SARA TILLEY

Sara Tilley is a writer, theatre artist, and clown, who lives and works in her home town of St. John’s, Newfoundland. Her artistic work bridges writing, theatre, and Pochinko Clown Through Mask technique, with each discipline informing and inspiring the others. After graduating with a BFA in Acting from York University, Sara founded a feminist theatre company, She Said Yes!, in 2002, and received the Rhonda Payne Theatre Award in 2006, which acknowledges the contribution of a woman working in theatre in Newfoundland and Labrador.  ||  Her writing spans the genres of playwriting, prose and poetry. She has written, co-written or co-created eleven plays to date, all of which have received professional production. Skin Room, her first novel (Pedlar Press, 2008), won both the Newfoundland and Labrador Percy Janes First Novel Award and the inaugural Fresh Fish Award for Emerging Writers, and was shortlisted for the Winterset Award and the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Prize. Sara won the Lawrence Jackson Writer’s Award from the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council in 2011.  || She’s been Writer in Residence at the Calgary Distinguished Writer’s Program, University of Calgary, at Berton House in Dawson City, Yukon, at Landfall in Brigus NL, and at 2Rooms Contemporary Art Projects in Duntara NL. Sara is one of a handful of Pochinko clown instructors in the world, having mentored with Ian Wallace in 2008. She offers Clown through Mask and Neutral Mask training in St. John’s and elsewhere across Canada.  ||  Her new novel, Duke (Pedlar Press, 2015), found its inspiration through mask work.

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