Winona Kent is an award-winning author who was born in London, England and grew up in Regina, Saskatchewan, where she completed her BA in English at the University of Regina. After moving to Vancouver, she graduated from UBC with an MFA in Creative Writing. More recently, she received her diploma in Writing for Screen and TV from Vancouver Film School.
Winona's writing breakthrough came many years ago when she won First Prize in the Flare Magazine Fiction Contest with her short story about an all-night radio newsman, Tower of Power.
Her spy novel Skywatcher was a finalist in the Seal Books First Novel Competition and was published in 1989. This was followed by a sequel, The Cilla Rose Affair, and her first mystery, Cold Play, set aboard a cruise ship in Alaska.
After three time-travel romances (Persistence of Memory, In Loving Memory and Marianne's Memory), Winona returned to mysteries with Disturbing the Peace, a novella, in 2017 and the novel Notes on a Missing G-String in 2019, both featuring the character she first introduced in Cold Play, professional jazz musician / amateur sleuth Jason Davey.
The third book in Winona's Jason Davey Mystery series, Lost Time, was published in 2020.
Winona's novella Salty Dog Blues was published in Sisters in Crime-Canada West's anthology Crime Wave in October 2020. Salty Dog Blues was nominated as a finalist in Crime Writers of Canada's Awards of Excellence for Best Crime Novella in April 2021.
Another Jason Davey short story, Blue Devil Blues, is one of the four entries in a new anthology, Last Shot, published in June 2021.
Winona has been a temporary secretary, a travel agent and the Managing Editor of a literary magazine. She recently retired from her full-time admin job at UBC's School of Population and Public Health. She's currently the BC/YT/NWT rep for the Crime Writers of Canada and is also an active member of Sisters in Crime - Canada West. After many decades living in Burnaby, BC, Winona moved to New Westminster in 2018, where she is now happily embracing life as a full-time author.
