Amanda Peters, Michelle Porter and Jack Wong among winners of 2024 Nova Scotia and Atlantic Book Awards
Amanda Peters, Michelle Porter and Jack Wong among the winners of 2024 Nova Scotia and Atlantic Book Awards.
The awards, managed by the Atlantic Book Awards Society, recognize books from Nova Scotia and Atlantic Canada including poetry, illustrated children’s books, adult fiction and nonfiction. The provincial and regional awards are collectively worth more than $55,000 and are selected by independent juries.
Peter’s The Berry Pickers won the Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction.
In The Berry Pickers, a four-year-old girl from a Mi’kmaq family goes missing in Maine’s blueberry fields in the 1960s. Nearly 50 years later, Norma, a young girl from an affluent family is determined to find out what her parents aren’t telling her. Little by little, the two families’ interconnected secrets unravel.
The Berry Pickers also won the 2024 Carnegie Medal for Excellence, was a finalist for the 2023 Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and was named one of CBC Books’ best fiction books of the year.
Peters is a writer of Mi’kmaq and settler ancestry living in Annapolis Valley, N.S. Her work has appeared in The Antigonish Review, the Alaska Quarterly Review and The Dalhousie Review. She was also the winner of the 2021 Indigenous Voices Award for Unpublished Prose and a participant in the 2021 Writers’ Trust Rising Stars program.
The Next Chapter3:10Amanda Peters on The Berry Pickers
Amanda Peters on the inspiration behind her novel, The Berry Pickers
A Grandmother Begins the Story by Porter won the $30,000 Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award.
A Grandmother Begins the Story follows five generations of Métis women through this life and the next in this debut novel about navigating identity through one’s ancestors. Carter, Allie, Lucie, Geneviève and Mamé are each faced with the many challenges of existing as an Indigenous woman. Told alongside the bison who used to roam freely and the land itself, this book explores family and culture through humour and multiple voices.
A Grandmother Begins the Story was on the shortlist for the 2023 Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.
Porter is a Métis writer and academic currently based in St. John’s. Her previous nonfiction books, Scratching River and Approaching Fire detail a lush family history of Indigenous storytellers. Her poetry collection, Inquiries was shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Porter also made the 2017 CBC Poetry Prize longlist for Slicing Lemons in April and the 2016 CBC Poetry Prize longlist for Between you and home.
The Next Chapter19:12Michelle Porter on A Grandmother Begins the Story
The Metis author Michelle Porter talks to Shelagh Rogers about her debut novel, A Grandmother Begins the Story, which features a multiplicity of voices, human and otherwise.
Wong won the Ann Connor Brimer Award for Atlantic Canadian Children’s Literature for his book The Words We Share.
The Words We Share explores an experience that’s shared by many children of immigrants — helping their parents with language translation.
In this picture book, a girl named Angie decides to help others in her community with translating, after becoming a successful translator for her dad. However, when one of her clients says that he’s not happy with her work, Angie looks to her dad for help, and together, they come up with a surprising solution.
Wong is a Halifax-based author and illustrator who was born in Hong Kong but grew up in Vancouver. His book When You Can Swim won the 2023 Governor General’s Literary Award for young people’s literature — illustrated books.
LISTEN | Jack Wong on The Words We Share:
The complete list of winners for the 2024 Nova Scotia Book Awards are:
The 2024 Atlantic Book Award winners are as follows:
Many of the winning 2024 titles are available in accessible formats via the Centre for Equitable Library Access website.
Previous winners include authors Michael Crummey, Tyler LeBlanc, Alison Taylor, Ami McKay, Marina Endicott and Lucas Crawford.
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