author
Samuel Fea
1872–1943
A clergyman-novelist based in Winnipeg, he is remembered for Irish Ned: The Winnipeg Newsy, a warm early-20th-century story set on the city’s streets. His writing draws on everyday urban life and a strong concern for children, community, and faith.
1 Audiobook
Irish Ned The Winnipeg Newsy
by Samuel Fea
About the author
Samuel Fea was a Canadian-based author and Anglican clergyman, identified on early editions of Irish Ned: The Winnipeg Newsy as The Rev. Samuel Fea, M.A., Ph.D., Rector of St. Peter’s, Winnipeg. The novel was published in Toronto in 1910 and is the work most clearly connected with his name.
The surviving sources suggest that Fea’s literary reputation rests chiefly on Irish Ned, a story about a young newspaper boy in Winnipeg. Because the book is so closely tied to city life, it offers readers a glimpse of Winnipeg in the early 1900s as well as the values that seem to have mattered to its author: kindness, perseverance, religion, and care for vulnerable children.
Reliable biographical information about Fea is limited in the sources found here, and even his death year is not fully consistent across modern listings. What can be said with confidence is that he was active in Winnipeg church life and left behind a novel that blends local color with a gentle moral outlook.