Member of the Order of Canada
Awarded on: 2014-11-20
Invested on: 2016-05-13
For celebrating our rural communities as the playwright of the much-loved Wingfield Farm series, and for championing the dramatic arts outside of Canada’s major centres.
Dan Needles is a writer who celebrates Canada’s rural communities. He is best known as the creator of the Wingfield stage comedies, a collection of one-man plays about a Torontonian stockbroker who quits his job to become an Ontario farmer. He has been praised for capturing the essence of Canada’s farming communities and for generating much-needed artistic opportunities in theatres outside of Canada’s major cities. His works rank amongst Canadian theatre’s most popular and longest-running productions.