Ray Guy: The Final Columns, 2003-2013 is a collection of the columns Ray Guy wrote for The Northeast Avalon Times, a community newspaper based in Portugal Cove. Guy previously achieved fame and acclaim for his astute and humorous observations of Newfoundland politics and society in columns in The Telegram and The Sunday Express from the 1960s to 1990s. Guy began writing for The Northeast Avalon Times in 2003, the same year Danny Williams was elected premier of the province. During the ensuing decade, Guy exercised the wit and satire that made him so admired by Newfoundland readers. Ray Guy: The Final Columns, 2003-2013 aims to make the brilliant writing of his last decade available to a broader audience. The foibles and folly of premiers on Confederation Hill, the looming disaster of the Muskrat Falls hydroelectric project and the frustrating fickleness of "the great Newfoundland voter" were repeatedly addressed by Guy in his unequaled style. Guy was quick to recognize Danny Williams as "another Smallwood," and had much to say and much to mock about the pomp, arrogance and authoritarian rule that largely led to the troubled times Newfoundland subsequently found itself in.

Ray Guy was a Newfoundland journalist and humourist best known for his satirical newspaper and magazine columns. He was born in Come By Chance, Placentia Bay, to George Hynes and Alice Louise Guy, but was raised and schooled in Arnold’s Cove, the community that was to provide fodder for many of his columns. Guy studied journalism at Ryerson Polytechnic Institute. After graduation, he wrote for the St. John’s Evening Telegram 1963–1974, and his columns also appeared in magazines such as Atlantic Insight and the Newfoundland Quarterly. His writings included political satire and humorous essays on life in a Newfoundland outport, and his columns in the Evening Telegram often criticized the policies and ridiculed the excesses of Premier Joseph Smallwood, during a time when political opposition to Smallwood was ineffectual. In 1977, Ray Guy received the Stephen Leacock Award for the collection, That Far Greater Bay. In 1979, Gordon Pinsent created Up at Ours, a half-hour CBC St. John’s television series that starred Mary Walsh as the owner of a boarding house and Ray Guy as the principal boarder. In 1985, Walsh appeared in and directed a stage play written by Guy, Young Triffie’s Been Made Away With, which Walsh directed as a film in 2006, promoted in some markets under the shorter title Young Triffie. Guy also appeared as a commentator on the CBC St. John’s news program Here & Now. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by Memorial University of Newfoundland in 2001. Guy also wrote a monthly column for the Northeast Avalon Times. Other books to Ray Guy’s credit include You May Know Them As Sea Urchins, Ma’am (1975), Outhouses of the East (1978), Beneficial Vapors (1981), An Heroine for Our Time (1983), This Dear and Fine Country (1985), Ray Guy’s Best (1987), and Ray Guy: The Smallwood Years (2008). Ray Guy passed away on May 14, 2013 in St. John’s, NL.

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