David Adams Richards, CM, ONB (born 17 October 1950) is a Canadian novelist, essayist, screenwriter and poet.
Born in Newcastle, New Brunswick, Richards left St. Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick, three credits shy of completing a B.A.. Richards has been a writer-in-residence at various universities and colleges across Canada, including the University of New Brunswick. He is currently the Artist in Residence at St. Thomas University.
Richards has received numerous awards including 2 Gemini Awards for scriptwriting for Small Gifts and "For Those Who Hunt The Wounded Down", the Alden Nowlan Award for Excellence in the Arts, and the Canadian Authors Association Award for his novel Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace. Richards is one of only three writers to have won in both the fiction and non-fiction categories of the Governor General's Award. He won the 1988 fiction award for Nights Below Station Street and the 1998 non-fiction award for Lines on the Water: A Fisherman's Life on the Miramichi. He was also a co-winner of the 2000 Giller Prize for Mercy Among the Children. In 2009, he was made a Member of the Order of Canada "for his contributions to the Canadian literary scene as an essayist, screenwriter and writer of fiction and non-fiction". In 2011 he received the Matt Cohen Prize.
In 1971, he married the former Peggy McIntyre. They have two sons, John Thomas Richards and Anton Richards, and reside in Fredericton as of December 2012.
The Writers' Federation of New Brunswick administers an annual David Adams Richards Prize for Fiction.
Richards' papers are currently housed at the University of New Brunswick.
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The Virgin filled so enormous a space in the life and thought of the time that one stands now helpless before the mass of testimony to her direct action and constant presence in every moment and form of the illusion which men thought they thought their existence.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“After school days are over, the girls ... find no natural connection between their school life and the new one on which they enter, and are apt to be aimless, if not listless, needing external stimulus, and finding it only prepared for them, it may be, in some form of social excitement. ...girls after leaving school need intellectual interests, well regulated and not encroaching on home duties.”
—Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards (1842–1911)