Due to various misadventures Gwen Lamont was not able to complete grade nine yet today she holds a BA in sociology, a BSW, an MSW, and an MFA in Creative Non-fiction. Gwen is the recipient of two academic awards for scholarship. Gwen’s major qualitative master’s research project, The Subjective Experience Of Men Who Murdered Their Intimate Partners, took two years, involved many prison interviews, hundreds of hours of data analysis and many months of writing. Gwen graduated Summa Cum Laude.

As a social worker Gwen focused on work with abused women, vulnerable children and victims of violence. For the last seven years of her career she was a psychotherapist with a specialty in counseling teenagers, trauma victims and distressed couples.

In 2019 when Gwen graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Non-fiction from University of King’s College, Halifax, Ms. Lorri Neilsen Glenn, one of Gwen’s professors, noted: The View From Coffin Ridge: A Childhood Exhumed is a one-of-a-kind story and Gwen’s fresh and distinctive voice makes it even more compelling. I predict this book will be one of the strongest to come out of the MFA program to date. 

Gwen was shortlisted for the 2018 Geist Postcard Contest for What’s in A Smile and long-listed for the 2023 CBC Non-Fiction Prize for her short story Survivor’s Guilt, from over 2300 entries across Canada. Ginger Press recently published The View From Coffin Ridge: A Childhood Exhumed, now available to order.

Gwen lives on a vineyard between two ghost towns in rural Annan, Ontario where she writes and also is managing partner of Coffin Ridge Boutique Winery.