The winners of the 2016 East Coast Literary Awards were unveiled Saturday night at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in Halifax.

Gary L. Saunders of Nova Scotia won the Evelyn Richardson Non-Fiction award for his book My Life with Trees (Gaspereau Press). Nova Scotia’s Sue Goyette took home the J.M. Abraham Poetry Award for The Brief Reincarnation of a Girl (Gaspereau Press) and R.W. Gray of New Brunswick received the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award for Entropic (NeWest Press).

The awards, which are presented by the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia (WFNS) and are peer-assessed, consider work published in 2015 by writers who choose to live and write in Atlantic Canada.

The East Coast Literary Awards program is a celebration not only of the shortlisted writers and publishers, but also of all who invested time and resources in submitting entries to the awards. “An arts program that hopes to serve and promote a writing community such as ours,” said WFNS President Carol Bruneau, “can only do so through the support of that community.”