Sharon Bala wins 2020 Newfoundland and Labrador Book Award for novel The Boat People
CBC Books | | Posted: October 6, 2020 3:41 PM | Last Updated: October 6, 2020
The winner of the children's/young adult category was Charis Cotter for her middle-grade novel The Ghost Road
Sharon Bala has won the 2020 Newfoundland and Labrador Book Award for fiction for her novel The Boat People.
The awards recognize the best literature written by authors from Newfoundland and Labrador.
In The Boat People, a ship carrying 500 Tamil refugees reaches the shores of British Columbia. Mahindan and his six-year-old son have survived a harrowing journey and hope to start a new life in Canada. But Mahindan is immediately taken into detention and left to wait there as politicians, journalists and the public debate the fate of the "boat people."
Bala is a writer from Newfoundland. The Boat People is her first book.
It was also a finalist for the 2018 Amazon Canada First Novel Award, the 2019 Margaret and John Savage First Book Award, and the 2019 Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award.
There are two categories in 2020: an award for adult fiction and an award for children's/young adult literature. The winners in each category will receive $1,500.
The winner of the children's/young adult category was Charis Cotter for her middle-grade novel The Ghost Road.
The Ghost Road is about a young girl named Ruth who is spending her summer in Newfoundland with her family for the first time. She meets a girl her own age named Ruby and they stumble upon a local legend about twins who are born in every generation, but die young, leaving their children motherless. And when strange things start to happen, Ruby and Ruth think it might be more than a local legend.
Cotter is an actor and writer who grew up in Toronto and now lives in Newfoundland. She is also the author of the novel The Swallow: A Ghost Story and the picture book The Ferryland Visitor: A mysterious tale.
The prizes alternate each year, with fiction and children's books being recognized in even years and poetry and nonfiction being recognized in odd years.
Books published in 2018 and 2019 were eligible for the 2020 edition of the prizes.
Last year's winners were Stan Dragland for his biography Gerald Squires and Alison Dyer for her poetry collection I'd Write the Sea Like a Parlour Game.
In 2018, Joel Thomas Hynes won the fiction category for We'll All Be Burnt in Our Beds Some Night and Sheilah Lukins won the children's/young adult category for Full Speed Ahead: Errol's Bell Island Adventure.