Kaleigh Trace

The Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia has revealed the winners of this year’s East Coast Literary Awards.

The $25,000 Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award went to Darren Greer for his third novel Just Beneath My Skin (Cormorant Books), about a father’s quest to rescue the son he abandoned eight years prior from the boy’s abusive, alcoholic mother in an impoverished Atlantic town. Sex educator and blogger Kaleigh Trace received the $2,000 Evelyn Richardson Non-fiction Award for Hot, Wet, & Shaking: How I Learned to Talk About Sex (Invisible Publishing), documenting her journey to sexual liberation. And Susan Paddon’s debut poetry collection about a woman’s obsession with reading Chekov’s work while caring for her dying mother, Two Tragedies in 429 Breaths (Brick Books), won her the $2,000 J.M. Abraham Poetry Award.

The recipients were honoured at a ceremony at Halifax’s Maritime Museum of the Atlantic on June 6.