Canadian · b. 1957
David Bergen is a Canadian novelist and short story writer born in 1957 in Port Edward, British Columbia, and raised in the Mennonite farming community of Niverville, Manitoba. He now lives in Winnipeg. After studying at a Bible college in British Columbia and creative communications at Red River College, he taught high school English for two decades while writing fiction on the side. His 2005 novel The Time in Between won the Scotiabank Giller Prize, Canada's most prestigious literary award, and two later books, The Matter with Morris (2010) and the story collection Here the Dark (2020), were shortlisted for the same prize. Bergen's fiction — including The Case of Lena S., The Age of Hope, and Stay Where You Are — is known for spare, unadorned prose applied to characters facing quiet moral crises, often within Mennonite or small-town Prairie settings. Days of Feasting and Rejoicing (2025), his twelfth novel, marks a turn toward literary crime fiction, following an American expat in Thailand who assumes a dead friend's identity.