Misto, John 1952-

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Misto, John 1952-

PERSONAL:

Born October 13, 1952, in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. Education: Graduated from the University of New South Wales.

ADDRESSES:

Agent—Cameron's Management, 7th Floor, 61 Marlborough St., (Locked Bag 848), Surry Hills, New South Wales 2010, Australia; Lateral Learning Speakers' Agency, P.O. Box 646, Spit Junction, New South Wales 2088, Australia.

CAREER:

Writer, playwright, and screenwriter.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Rodney Seaborn Playwright's Award for Best New Australian Play, for Hare on the Willow; New South Wales Premier's Literary Award for Best Play and the Australia Remembers National Play Competition (winner), both for The Shoe-Horn Sonata. Australian Film Institute (AFI) awards (three), including Best Screenplay in a Television Drama, 1999, for The Day of the Roses; Logie award, for The Day of the Roses; Writers' Guild Awards (three), for television writing, including for The Day of the Roses; Gold Plaque for Best Telemovie, Chicago International Television Festival, for The Rescue of Stuart Diver.

WRITINGS:

Peter and Pompey (juvenile), Penguin (Ringwood, New South Wales, Australia), 1988.

The Shoe-Horn Sonata (play; produced in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, at the Ensemble Theatre, 1996), Currency Press (Sydney, New South Wales, Austraia), 1996.

Gossamer (play), produced in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, at the Ensemble Theatre, 1997.

Harp on the Willow (play), produced in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, at the Ensemble Theatre, 2003.

The Devil's Companions (novel), Hodder Headline Australia (Sydney, New South Wales, Australia), 2005.

Also author of the play Sky. Television writing credits include The Young Doctors (series), 1976; Waterloo Station (series), 1983; Palace of Dreams (miniseries), 1985; Dancing Daze (series), 1986; The Dirtwater Dynasty (series), 1988; Touch the Sun: Peter & Pompey (movie), 1988; The Fremantle Conspiracy, (movie), 1988; G.P. (series), 1989; (and creator) The Damnation of Harvey McHugh (series), 1994; Day of the Roses (miniseries), 1998; Heroes' Mountain, 2002; MDA (series) 2002; Heroes' Mountain: The Rescue of Stuart Diver (movie), 2002; White Collar Blues (series), 2002; Second Chance, 2005; also The Last Frontier (miniseries) and Natural Causes (movie).

SIDELIGHTS:

John Misto is a novelist who has also written extensively for the Australian stage and television. Among his most renowned and highly regarded plays is The Shoe-Horn Sonata, which focuses on Australian women who were Japanese prisoner-of-war detainees during World War II. Among his other plays is Harp on the Willow in which Misto borrows from a true event to tell the story of music sensation Mary O'Hara, who is famous at eighteen but goes on to disappear and join a convent after she becomes a widow at age twenty. In Gossamer, Misto once again borrows from real events to tell the story of two little girls whose claim to have seen fairies is investigated by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Houdini.

Misto is also author of the novel The Devil's Companions, which tells of a three-year-old who disappears on Christmas Eve, seemingly vanishing into thin air out of the church pew where she was sitting. More than two decades later, detective Greg Raine finds himself on the case when evidence suggests that the young girl, who was long thought dead, may actually still be alive. His investigation leads him to the Catholic Church and the local convent, where the nuns may be involved in her disappearance. Simon Caterson, writing in Australia's the Age, commented that the author "eschews the kind of international millennial conspiracy theory deployed in such a formulaic way by … others, and instead provides crime fiction in which the plausibility factor is relatively high." A contributor to the Australian Crime Fiction Database wrote: "This is easily the best crime fiction novel I have read this year. The mystery has been masterfully set up, moving fluidly to a blockbuster of an ending that simply blew me away."