Marnie Woodrow (photo: Janette Piquette)

Ontario authors James King‚ David Neil Lee‚ and Marnie Woodrow were the winners of this year’s Hamilton Literary Awards, presented at a ceremony on the evening of Dec. 8.

Woodrow’s latest novel‚ Heyday (Tightrope Books)‚ which parallels the stories of two women from disparate time periods‚ won her the $500 fiction prize‚ beating out finalists including Lawrence Hill, nominated for his Pierre Berton Award–winning The Illegal. The non-fiction category – also a $500 purse – was presented to King for Inner Places: The Life of David Milne (Dundurn Press)‚ King’s 2015 biography of the titular painter. Lee received the $750 Kerry Schooley Award for “best capturing the spirit of Hamilton” in his H.P. Lovecraftian mystery-thriller The Midnight Games (Wolsak & Wynn).