Allison Lawlor
BIOGRAPHY
Allison is a freelance writer. Since 2003, she has worked from her home in Prospect.
Allison is a freelance writer. Since 2003, she has worked from her home in Prospect.
While studying journalism at Ryerson University, she spent a summer working as a reporter for The Rural Voice, a farming magazine based in Blyth, Ont. She happily travelled the countryside talking to farmers and hearing stories about the latest breed of cattle and amazing new varieties of corn and cauliflower.
From Blyth, she moved on to work as a reporter at several daily newspapers in Ontario, including The Brantford Expositor and The Standard in St. Catharines. After landing a summer internship at The Globe and Mail in Toronto, she stayed for another two years writing and editing for the paper’s website.
In 2003, she returned to Nova Scotia, the place she had fallen in love with as an English and Russian student at the University of King’s College a decade earlier.
Her work has been published in newspapers and magazines. She has also written seven non-fiction books.
Her first book 250 Years of Progress: Halifax Regional Fire and Emergency was published by Nimbus in 2005. Her second book, Rum-Running was published by Nimbus in 2009. It was the first book in a series called Stories of Our Past.
In 2015, The Roar of the Sea, a book ghostwritten by Allison, was published by Boulder Publications. Her book, “The Saddest Ship Afloat”- The Tragedy of the MS St. Louis was published by Nimbus in 2016.
Broken Pieces, a children’s non-fiction book about the Halifax Explosion, appeared in bookstores just before Dec. 6, 2017, the 100th anniversary of the explosion. Broken Pieces was nominated for a 2019 Silver Birch Award by the Ontario Library Association and a 2019-2020 Hackmatack Children’s Choice Book Award.
Allison also works as a writing coach with journalism students at the University of King’s College.
