Tom Moore

Tom Moore is an award-winning writer in St. John’s, Newfoundland. His first novel, Good-Bye Momma (Breakwater) became a Canadian best seller, and won a “Children’s Choice” award from the Children’s Book Centre in Toronto. It was translated into Danish (Monksgaard publishers) of Copenhagen in 1982 and into Romanian (Cite Libra publishers) in 1979. The CBC produced a radio play version, and The Canadian Book of Lists named it one of the best children’s books in Canada.

In 1994 Angels Crying (self-published) became his second national best seller, and was required reading at schools of Social Work, including Memorial University, Dalhousie University, College of the North Atlantic, and the University of Maine at Presque Isle. It was translated into Chinese (New Sprouts) in 2002.

In 2000 Ghost World won the inaugural Percy Janes award for best novel manuscript. The Summer My Mother Died, a short story, was a winning entry in Canadian Storyteller, Toronto, in the summer of 2004. He also published The Black Heart, a collection of poetry (Harry Cuff Publishers) and Wilfred Grenfell, a children’s biography (Fitzhenry & Whiteside).

His poems Ancestors, Songs, and Caplin Scull were broadcast as operatic song settings on CBC radio by Lynn Channing, Music Department University of Calgary, and Songs by Peter Mannion and the Galway University Choir in Ireland. In 1997 Ancestors was read  for Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II on her visit to Bonavista.

His novel The Sign on My Father’s House won the NL Reads 2020 competition, the Margaret Dooley Fiction award, and the NL Public Libraries called it “the must-read book for 2020.” Moore is the only writer to win both the Percy Janes award and the Margaret Dooley award for fiction.

His short story, Pegasus, won the Arts and Letters competition, and was published in the Newfoundland Quarterly, Summer 2020. His poem An Ode to Autumn was published in Our Canada magazine in 2020. His reading from The Sign on My Father’s House was featured on CBC Radio’s Canada Presents on Saturday 5/16/2020. Stingray Productions awarded the book a $2000 radio promotion grant in 2021. His readings from the novel have attracted thousands of views on his public Facebook site. The sequel, My Father’s Son, was published 2021.