Herb Curtis
Canadian writer

Herb Curtis (born 1949) is a Canadian novelist and humorist who writes about and has long lived in New Brunswick. He is best known for writing the Brennen Siding Trilogy, three connected novels set in the fictional community of Brennen Siding, New Brunswick (loosely based on Kennan Siding, New Brunswick). The trilogy consists of the novels The Americans are Coming, The Last Tasmanian and The Lone Angler. The most critically acclaimed of the series is The Last Tasmanian which won the 1992 Thomas Head Raddall Award and was nominated for the Commonwealth Prize. In 1999, Curtis was nominated for the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour for his collection of humorous stories, Luther Corhern's Salmon Camp Chronicles and in January 2018 he was presented with the prestigious Sesquicentennial Medal in recognition of his valuable service to the nation.
Curtis grew up near Blackville, New Brunswick, and currently resides in Fredericton. His novels The Americans are Coming and The Last Tasmanian have both been adapted for the stage, and the former has also become and a standard text in schools throughout Atlantic Canada and Quebec. In 2006, Curtis was a contributing author to The Penguin Anthology of Canadian Humour.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q15528036. VIAF identifies the subject as 68975323. The Library of Congress control number is nr93000100. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1949, 1992, 1999 and 2018.
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This entry incorporates text from “Herb Curtis” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.