Sharon Bala's debut novel The Boat People has won the 2019 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction, an annual award given to a novel that best illustrates the role of lawyers in the world.

Bala, who is based in St. John's, will receive a signed special edition of To Kill a Mockingbird as her prize at the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 29.

The Boat People begins when a rusty cargo ship carrying hundreds of refugees from Sri Lanka arrives on the shores of B.C. It follows Mahindan, a refugee onboard, his lawyer Priya and a Japanese-Canadian adjudicator named Grace, who is assigned to determine whether Mahindan will be permitted to stay in Canada or not.

"Writing this novel was a meditation on empathy. My greatest hope is that it has the same effect on readers," said Bala in a press release.

The novel was inspired by a real 2010 case, when a ship of Tamil refugees arrived off the coast of Vancouver, looking to come to Canada.

"There wasn't much on the public record about its passengers, so I had to make up the story, at least in terms of the individual people," Bala told CBC Books in an 2018 interview.

The Boat People was defended on Canada Reads 2018 by singer and television personality Mozhdah Jamalzadah.

"The Boat People touched me, haunted me and educated me — in much the same way To Kill a Mockingbird did when I first read it as an impressionable child," said author Claire Hamner Matturro, who was on the selection panel.

"It's the kind of book I wish the whole world could read with an open mind and an open heart."

Other members of the judging panel included Robert Barnes, Steven Hobbes, Tom Bevill, Utz McKnight and Gin Phillips.

The Harper Lee Prize was founded in 2011 by the University of Alabama School of Law and the ABA Journal in celebration of the 50th anniversary of To Kill a Mockingbird.