The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters makes the shortlist for 3 Nova Scotia and Atlantic Book Awards

Amanda Peters’ The Berry Pickers is on the shortlist for three Nova Scotia and Atlantic Book Awards: The Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction, the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award for Fiction and the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award.

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.

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 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.

Amanda 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 She was also the winner of the 2021 Indigenous Voices Award for Unpublished Prose and a participant in the 2021 Writers’ Trust Rising Stars program. 

Authors Charlene Carr, Jack Wong and Michelle Porter are also nominated for prizes. 

Carr is shortlisted for the Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction and the $30,000 Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award for her novel Hold My Girl. 

Hold My Girl is a dual narrative novel about a seemingly impossible situation: two women, Katherine and Tess, find out after pregnancy that their eggs were mistakenly switched during in vitro fertilization (IVF). For Katherine, who conceived her miracle baby, Rose, the news is her worst nightmare realized. For Tess, the news is a seed of hope: her IVF treatment ended in a stillborn birth. 

Named a Black writer to watch in 2023 by CBC Books, Carr is a Toronto-raised writer and author based in Nova Scotia whose work explores truth in fiction. She is the author of several independently published novels and a novella. Hold My Girl is her first novel with a major publisher. 

Wong is shortlisted for 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.

Michelle Porter’s A Grandmother Begins the Story is shortlisted for the 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 complete list of nominees for the 2024 Nova Scotia Book Awards are:

Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction

Evelyn Richardson Non-Fiction Award

George Borden Writing for Change

Margaret and John Savage First Book Award, Fiction

Margaret and John Savage First Book Award, Non-Fiction

• About Canada: Dental Care by Brandon Doucet
• Gutsy: Living My Best Life with Crohn’s Disease and Ulcerative Colitis by Heather Fegan
• Kings of Their Own Ocean: Tuna, Obsession, and the Future of our Seas by Karen Pinchin

The 2024 Atlantic Book Award nominees are as follows: 

Ann Connor Brimer Award for Atlantic Canadian Children’s Literature

• The Journal of Anxious Izzy Parker by Alma Fullerton
• A Green Velvet Secret by Vicki Grant
• Kepmite’taqney Ktapekiaqn – Le chant d’honneur – The Honour Song by George Paul
• The Words We Share by Jack Wong

APMA Best Atlantic-Published Book Award 

• Impressions of Newfoundland: The Art of Ting Ting Chen by Ting Ting Chen  
• Mary Pratt: A Love Affair with Vision by Anne Koval
• No Ordinary Magic: The Art of Laurie Swim by Carol Bruneau 
• Recipe for a Good Life by Lesley Crewe

J. M. Abraham Atlantic Poetry Award

Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award

This year, the general public will determine the first ever Reader’s Choice Award for a book written by an Atlantic Canadian author or published in Atlantic Canada. Voting is now open by using this link. 

The winners of the awards will be announced during the Atlantic Book Festival. The Nova Scotia Book Awards winners will be announced in Dartmouth, N.S., on June 3 and the winners of the Atlantic Book Awards will be announced in Halifax on June 5. 

Previous winners include authors Michael Crummey, Tyler LeBlanc, Alison Taylor, Ami McKay, Marina Endicott and Lucas Crawford.