Steven Hayward is a novelist and short story writer born in Toronto, Canada. The eldest of two brothers, he attended the University of Toronto and York University, and now teaches in the English Department at Colorado College, in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
Hayward’s most recent novel is the Canadian National Bestseller, Don’t Be Afraid. Set in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, it tells the story seventeen-year-old Jim Morrison–not the lead singer of the Doors who died a rock ‘n’ roll death in 1971, but a chubby seventeen-year-old living in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, who was born days after the singer’s death.
Jim, or Jimmy, as most people call him, has been living a largely invisible life, overshadowed by his older brother, Mike, popular and charismatic, and his father, Fort, a stern and unyielding engineer. But everything changes the night the public library explodes, with pieces of books and catalogue cards falling like snow from the dark sky.
A critical and commercial success, Don’t Be Afraid was a Globe and Mail Best Book for 2012 and was also named one of the top ten novels of the year by Toronto’s Now Magazine. “Don’t Be Afraid will break your heart in both sympathy and empathic celebration,” writes the novelist Robert Weirsema in the Globe and Mail. “It is both an elegy and an enthusiastic affirmation, darkness and light. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and you’ll wish more books were like this.”
Read more about Steven Hayward’s biography…
Read Steven Hayward’s Short Stories
Preview the Prologue for Frances Inscrutable