George M. Johnson

George M. Johnson (B.A. Hon. Scholar’s Elective, English and Psychology, Western; M.A. McMaster; Ph.D. McMaster) is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia. He specializes in: creative writing, particularly screenplay, stage play, fiction and children’s writing; Modern and Transitional (1880-1920) literature: drama, novel, poetry, biography; psychological and psychoanalytical approaches to literature and theory; cultural history.

He is an award-winning playwright and screenwriter: his comic play “Still Life With Nudes” won the 2007 Canadian National Playwriting Competition, among others, and has been published by ArtAge in Portland. His screenplay “Peace Pledge” received Honorable Mention in the Euroscript Screenwriting Competition (London), was an Official Finalist in the Cannes Screenplay Contest, won the Wildsound Festival Screenwriting Competition (Toronto), where it received a table-read which can be viewed online, and recently received an Award of Excellence from the New Renaissance Film Festival in London.

His children's story "Sophia's Secrets" won Best Children’s Story in the 2018 Pacific Northwest Writers Association Literary Contest https://www.pnwa.org/page/winners2018, and will be published byClvis Books in 2022. Two other children's stories, "How Hope Became An Activist" and "Marisa and the Mountains" have been published to critical acclaim.

He has also published several books of literary criticism, most recently Mourning and Mysticism in First World War Literature and Beyond: Grappling With Ghosts (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, paperback 2018
https://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9781349673476 ). The book traces how iconic writers - including Arthur Conan Doyle, J.M. Barrie, Rudyard Kipling, Virginia Woolf, Wilfred Owen, and Aldous Huxley - shaped their response to the loss of loved ones in the First World War through their embrace of mysticism.

Palgrave also published his book Dynamic Psychology in Modernist British Fiction (2006). He was the Editor of (and contributor to) three volumes of the Dictionary of Literary Biography (Gale) on Late-Victorian and and Edwardian Writers and British Novelists Between the Wars. He has also published numerous articles on late 19th and 20th century British Literature. His very first article won the Andrew J. Kappel Prize for the year’s outstanding submission to the journal Twentieth Century Literature and was judged by John Fowles.