First published in short fiction back in 1990, Jayne Barnard won a Saskatchewan Writers Guild award for Children’s Literature with “Princess Alex and the Dragon Deal.” During a busy decade writing plays and performing for children’s theatre, she made her television debut dressed in a dragon suit for Robert Munsch’s ‘Paper Bag Princess’. Also for Saskatchewan television, she wrote and directed a short film on domestic violence, called ‘Daddy is not like Grandpa.’ After completing a pair of university degrees covering theatre, art history and child psychology, she led children’s drama and art therapy workshops and designed creative programming for daycares, museums and summer camps.

At the millennium, she retired from acting and focused on writing fiction. She became a regular contributor to Canadian Storyteller magazine, among other publications. Her short mystery fiction was three times short-listed for the Great Canadian Story prize. She was a children’s fiction judge for the Canadian Crime Writing awards in 2004 and a short fiction judge for the 2005 Derringer Prize.

Her fascination with crime goes back to Canada’s Prohibition era of the 1910’s and ‘20’s, when Al Capone and other US bootleggers were trying to export their violent brand of business into the Canadian west. Her non-fiction works on Canada’s Prohibition have appeared in Western People and other prairie magazines. Her most recent award-nominated short story, ‘Tommy Palmer’s Ghost’, is set in 1922 Victoria and based on a true incident involving a high-ranking police officer.

Her latest publication is a present-day short story set on the Bow River here in Calgary. ‘Bow Tide’ appears in the anthology ‘Dead in the Water’ from Rendezvous Press, and includes 19 stories by award-winning Canadian crime writers, with each tale featuring a Canadian body of water along with one or more human bodies.

Jayne is active in several mystery writers groups and edits Mystery Press, a semi-annual magazine for new and aspiring mystery writers