KENT STETSON Playwright/Director/Educator

In the year 2001, Marshfield Dramatist Kent Stetson received Canada’s highest literary honour, The Governor General’s Literary Award for his classically structured three act tragedy set on the ice fields off the north coast of Newfoundland in 1914, The Harps of God. This play also won The Canadian Authors Association drama award for excellence. Drama laureate Stetson, the fourth child of Helen and Cecil Stetson was born in 1948 and raised on the family farm. Kent pursued his career as a writer and director in Nova Scotia in the 1970s and ‘805 before moving to Montreal, where he currently resides when not at home on The Island.

Strong international recognition arose early in Kent’s career for his influential work dealing with the AIDS crises in the 1989 Neptune Theatre production, Warm Wind in China. His national theatrical and literary reputation was secured with the Alberta Theatre Projects production of his second major work for the stage Queen of the Cadillac. He is currently at work on the PEI

Highland Scots musical Caledonia commissioned by The Confederation Centre for main stage production at the Charlottetown Summer Festival.

Kent Stetson is a third generation Prince Edward Island writer/story teller. His mother Helen Stetson is a well known Island poet. His maternal grandfather, the late Daniel Lochland MacPherson of Caledonia, King’s County, was among the last of the Island’s native born Highland Gaelic singers and story tellers.

Kent has taught advanced play writing at McGill and Concordia universities, and at The National Theatre School in Montreal.

Kent considers himself an Islander and an Island writer. His fictionalized dramatic ode to farm life in Marshfield from 1946—2001, Horse High, Bull Strong, Pig Tight, was awarded the inaugural PEI Museum and Heritage Foundation’s Wendell Boyle Award in recognition of his contribution in a performance medium highlighting or interpreting the history of Prince Edward Island.

Courtesy 01 Cecil Stetson

Her Excellency Governor General Adrienne Clarkson presents the 2001 Governor General’s Literary Award for drama to winner, Kent Stetson.

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