Just Beneath My SkinTwoTragedieshotwetshaking-cover

The East Coast Literary Awards celebrate and promote excellence in writing from Atlantic Canada. It is administered by the Writers Federation of Nova Scotia. There are three awards:

– The Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award ($25,000), for the best Atlantic work of fiction in the last year.
– The JM Abraham Poetry Award ($2,000), for the best Atlantic book of poetry in the last year.
– The Evelyn Richardson Non-Fiction Award ($2,000) for the best Atlantic book of non-fiction in the last year.

There were no Newfoundland nor Labradorian winners this year. In fact Nova Scotia claimed the entirety of the categories.

This Year’s Thomas Head Raddall Winner: Darren Greer’s Just Beneath My Skin

Darren Greer is best known for his stellar, ReLit and Pearson Readers’ Choice Award winning novel, Still Life with June. His latest, Just Beneath My Skin, takes place in the small town of North River, where ” every day that goes by bleeds into the next. Poverty begets hopelessness, hopelessness breeds violence, violence causes despair. The only way to change fate, a minister tells his son, is to leave.  The minister’s son, Jake MacNeil, chooses to ignore his father’s advice. Only when he realizes what has become of his life — working a grueling dead-end job, living with a drunk, friends with a murderer — does he decide to make something of himself. But in choosing freedom, Jake abandons his own son, Nathan, to the care of the boy’s abusive mother. Years later, a reformed Jake comes back for Nathan, to finally set things right. But in North River, everything comes around again; when a dangerous figure from the past becomes hell-bent on dragging the new Jake ‘back down where he belongs,’ three generations of MacNeil men must come together to pay the full price of hope. Gritty, unrelenting, yet peppered with Darren Greer’s trademark poignance, Just Beneath My Skin is the work of an author at the height of his game.”

This Year’s JM Abraham Poetry Award Winner: Susan Paddon’s Two Tragedies in 429 Breaths

Susan Paddon’s poems have appeared in Arc, CV2, The Antigonish Review and Geist. Two Tragedies in 429 Breaths is a “book-length series of poems written from the perspective of a daughter who reads Chekhov obsessively while spending a spring and summer caring for her mother, who is dying from pulmonary fibrosis. Through the prism of the relationships in Chekhov’s work and life an honest, intimate, and even occasionally humorous portrayal of the energy we put into each other’s lives through deterioration and suffering. A prismatic, memorable debut.”

This Year’s Evelyn Richardson Non-fiction Award Winner: Kaleigh Trace’s Hot, Wet, and Shaking: How I Learned to Talk about Sex

Kaleigh Trace’s work has appeared in The Coast, The Huffington Post, CRIT, The Tide, and on her own blog: The Fucking Facts. “This is a sex book. It’s a book about having sex by yourself, with one person, or with twenty people if everyone is down. It’s about saying words like cunt, fuck, and come. But it’s also about the things we don’t talk about—the mystery, the expectations, and the bullshit that can go along with sex. Kaleigh Trace—disabled, queer, sex educator—chronicles her journey from ignorance to bliss as she shamelessly discusses her sexual exploits, bodily negotiations, and attempts at adulthood, sparing none of the details and assuming you are not polite company.”