The 13 winners of the 2018 Atlantic Book Awards, celebrating excellence in East Coast writing and book publishing, were announced on May 10. Cape Breton couple Sarah Faben and Oisin Curran were each honoured in their respective categories.
Curran beat Faber for the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award with his novel Blood Fable, about a utopian society in the 1980s and an 11-year-old follower whose visions of the past may be predicting their future. The award comes with a $25,000 grand prize, meant to provide “the gift of time and peace of mind” in which to create new work.
Faber won the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award for her novel All Is Beauty Now, about family secrets in the wake of a daughter’s vanishing in Brazil in the 1960s.
The awards were presented in Halifax at a bilingual gala ceremony organized by the Atlantic Publishers Marketing Association. A complete list of winners follows:
Alistair MacLeod Prize for Short Fiction: Eva Crocker, Barrelling Forward (House of Anansi Press)
Ann Connor Brimer Award for Children’s Literature: Charis Cotter, The Painting (Tundra Books)
Atlantic Publishers Marketing Association’s Best Atlantic-Published Book Award: Joanna Henry and Ilana Landberg-Lewis, Powered by Love: A Grandmothers’ Movement to End AIDS in Africa (Goose Lane Editions)
Atlantic Book Award for Scholarly Writing: Joan Baxter, The Mill: Fifty Years of Pulp and Protest (Pottersfield Press)
The Robbie Robertson Dartmouth Book Award (Non-Fiction): Quentin Casey, The Sea Was In Their Blood: The Disappearance of the Miss Ally’s Five-Man Crew (Nimbus Publishing)
Democracy 250 Atlantic Book Award for Historical Writing: Brian Douglas Tennyson, Nova Scotia at War, 1914-1919 (Nimbus)
Evelyn Richardson Non-Fiction Award: John DeMont, The Long Way Home: A Personal History of Nova Scotia (McClelland & Stewart)
Jim Connors Dartmouth Book Award (Fiction): David Huebert, Peninsula Sinking (Biblioasis)
J.M. Abraham Poetry Award: Julia McCarthy, All the Names Between (Brick Books)
Lillian Shepherd Award for Excellence in Illustration: Sydney Smith (ill.), Town is by the Sea, written by Joanne Schwartz (Groundwood Books)
Margaret and John Savage First Book Award (Fiction): Sarah Faber, All is Beauty Now (M&S)
Margaret and John Savage First Book Award (Non-fiction): Jen Powley, Just Jen: Thriving Through Multiple Sclerosis (Roseway Publishing)
Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award: Oisin Curran, Blood Fable (Book*hug)