Judges comments for To the Edge of the Sea First Book Award winner

To the Edge of the Sea won the First Book Award at the Saskatchewan Book Awards this past weekend! It has been a long journey from researching to writing to getting published and promoting a first novel. It is great and wonderful and more to have this acknowledgement. Here are the judges comments and John A and I have a wee dram of champagne, Gord Hunter pours.

Joan Barfoot, Christine Cowley and Katherine Gordon

      In the mid-19th century, three young Prince Edward Islanders explore their disparate futures at home and away, in a debut novel that is lyrical and precise in its descriptions of land, sea and people, and powerful in its accounts of both personal and political histories of the province and country. 

 Much thanks to Shelley Banks for the pictures. You can see more of Shelley's work at Latitude Drifts

You can also see my friend Gord Hunter's (who won the gorgeous raffle prize basket with all the winning books, wine, and Prairie Cherry chocolates from  Over the Hill Orchards) blog posts here at Life is too short to drink cheap wine

To the Edge of the Sea wins Saskatchewan Book Award

Last night at the Saskatchewan Book Awards Gala my novel To the Edge of the Sea, set during the Confederation conferences of 1864 in Charlottetown and Quebec won First Book Award!

You can read the Leader Post article  here

I'll add more on what the jury said and some of the great photos in a bit - John A gets his own glass of champagne, and then he shares it with Curtis McManus who won the non-fiction prize for his book Happyland A History of the "Dirty Thirties" in Saskatchewan, 1914 - 1937.

A pretty nice night.