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Peter Behrens is a Canadian novelist, screenwriter and short story writer. His debut novel, The Law of Dreams, won the 2006 Governor General's Award for English fiction.
Behrens was born and raised in Montreal, where he studied at Concordia University and McGill University. He was a Fellow of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and held a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. His earliest short fiction can be found in Best Canadian Stories 1978 and Best Canadian Stories 1979, and in his debut short story collection, Night Driving. He subsequently worked in Hollywood as a screenwriter; though he continued to publish short stories and essays in Canadian and American magazines, he did not publish another book until The Law of Dreams, his novel of a young man driven into exile during Ireland's Great Famine. The NYT called the book "Absorbing, unsparing and beautifully written...a masterly novel." The NYT called his second novel, The O'Briens, published in 2012 "a major accomplishment". "The O'Briens" will be published in French by Editions Philippe Rey in 2014.
As a screenwriter, Behrens is a member of the Writers Guild of America. He has guest-lectured at UCLA Film School and taught at Simon Fraser University, the University of Southern Maine, Colorado College, and Wichita State University. He currently lives in Maine and West Texas with his family.
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