“I have a very strong sense that what makes Newfoundland… unique,” says Michael Crummey, “what’s different about us is the stories we have, of what we came from and what we are. It’s an unbelievably rich tradition.”

Michael Crummey was born and raised in Newfoundland, though he’s secured his status as honorary local following a spell in Kingston as a student and writer, during which time he was the inaugural recipient of the Bronwen Wallace Award for Poetry. His first poetry collection won the Writers’ Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador Book Award for Poetry; his second was short-listed for the Milton Acorn People’s Poetry Award. His fiction novels are equally acclaimed: Galore won the Canadian Authors Association’s Fiction Award, the Commonwealth Prize, was short-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Award and the Governor General’s Award. Sweetland was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award, and River Thieves was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. The Innocents was finalist for the Giller Prize, Governor General’s Literary Awards, and Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and won the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award. The Writers’ Trust jury called it a “cruel and beautiful adventure tale and meditation on survival, solitude, and adolescent desire… By turns touching and harrowing… this novel is a page-turning masterclass in landscape writing and the longings and sorrows of the human heart. Crummey’s fine ear for the vernacular and the poetic casts a preternatural beauty over this terrifying world that lingers long after the story has ended.”

This year Michael returns with The Adversary, a story about a ruthless act of sabotage that sets off decades of acrimony in an isolated outport on Newfoundland’s northern coastline.

Michael’s appearance is supported by Author Patrons Pat MacKay and Gillian Graham

Appearing in 23. Outport Infighting