About Winona 

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 and 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 short story Dietrich's Ash was an Okanagan Short Fiction Award winner and was published in Canadian Author & Bookman, anthologized in Pure Fiction (Fitzhenry & Whiteside) and broadcast on the CBC Radio program Ambience.

Her short story Creatures from Greek Mythology was a Second Prize Winner and WQ Editors Prize and was published in Cross-Canada Writers Quarterly.

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 and the fourth book, Ticket to Ride, in 2022. 

Her fifth Jason Davey mystery, Bad Boy, was published in September 2024.

Winona's novella Salty Dog Blues, featuring Jason Davey in what is chronologically his first mystery, was published in Sisters in Crime-Canada West's debut 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.

Her Jason Davey short story, Blue Devil Blues, was one of four entries in the anthology, Last Shot, published in June 2021. 

Her short story Terminal Lucidity was published in Sisters in Crime-Canada West's second anthology, Women of a Certain Age, in May 2022 and her story On the Internet, Nobody Knows You're a Dog, will appear in Sisters in Crime-Canada West's third anthology, Dangerous Games, in October 2024.

And Winona's own anthology, Ten Stories That Worried My Mother (a collection of 10 short stories from 1982 until now, including four prize-winners, three mysteries, two previously unpublished works and one where the hero manages to spare-change John Lennon at the premiere of A Hard Day's Night in 1964) was published in August 2023.

Winona has been a temporary secretary, a travel agent, a screenwriter, the Managing Editor of a literary magazine and a Program Assistant at the University of British Columbia. After many decades working in jobs completely unrelated to writing, Winona is now happily embracing life as a full-time author. 

She's the current Chair of the Crime Writers of Canada, and is an active member of Sisters in Crime-Canada West, the Federation of BC Writers, the Tri-City Wordsmiths and the Royal City Literary Arts Society.

Winona lives in New Westminster, BC with her husband, and a concerning number of disobedient houseplants, many of which were rescued from her apartment building’s compost bin after being abandoned by previous owners.

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