Locate me
Atlantic Canada’s literary community and the public came together at the Alderney Landing Theatre to celebrate the best books of the last year at the 2015 Atlantic Books Awards gala on May 14th
Together the eight awards recognize the best creators and publishers in the region, but each celebrates a different genre or aspect of book publishing.
The Margaret and John Savage First Book Award, for example, celebrates an author’s initial published work. Atlantic Book Awards Society president Heather MacKenzie was thrilled to see that this particular award received more than 30 entries this year.“There’s a huge talent pool of young and emerging writers. These first books were of really high quality. That bodes really well that these are the people we’re going to see keep publishing and creating work down the road,” she said.
Author and journalist Linden MacIntyre took home the Jim Connors Dartmouth Book Award (Fiction) for Punishment.
“Where I grew up there was one way to gain the positive approval of adults: to be able to play a fiddle or tell a story,” he joked. “You could be the biggest reprobate in the place, but if you could play the fiddle or tell a story, or do both, you were welcome in the kitchen. So I, lacking the discipline or the talent to play the fiddle, figured I’m gonna start telling stories because, by God, that’s one way of getting to the Atlantic Book Awards,” he said.
Joseph Muise is a Halifax-based freelance print designer, translator, and ebook developer and the art director of Atlantic Books Today. A graduate of the Oxford International Centre for Publishing Studies, his work has appeared in the New Internationalist magazine and various books published in Canada and the United Kingdom.
