David Morton has worked as a logger, a bus boy, a taxi driver, dishwasher, janitor, a night watchman and a caster-cleaner in a hospital. He was once a circulation assistant for The Province newspaper, where he took complaints from people who had not received their newspaper at six in the morning.

He wrote for newspapers and magazines through much of the 1980s and 1990s. He co-hosted a radio show about the Vancouver literary scene, called “Vanlit.” He wrote magazine articles for Vancouver, Equity and Saturday Night magazine among others. A poem of his was published in O magazine, April 2011.

He worked in corporate communications for financial institutions and as an independent contractor. For eight years, he operated a web publishing company. In the early 2000s, he became a teacher of English as a second language.

David’s writing aspirations were fuelled by his father, an author of four books on local history. He was extremely disciplined, a medical doctor by day who toiled on his books by night. He wasn’t the easiest person to live with, but he was productive as a writer. David learned a lot by watching him go into his den in the evening and hearing the typewriter clack away into the night.

Since 2011, David has lived on Pender Island in British Columbia’s Gulf Islands, where he wrote The Song of Oswald, a novel about a 14th Century monk who is ejected from his abbey and thus becomes a thief and adventurer.

David is aided and abetted in this novel-writing enterprise by his wife, Jennifer Conkie, who has also written a novel, The Clam Gardens.