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SLEEP IS NOW A FOREIGN COUNTRY a finalist for the Trillium Book Award!

This morning the finalists for the Trillium Book Award, worth $20,000, were announced, and they include Sleep Is Now a Foreign Country by Mike Barnes, published by Biblioasis press on November 14, 2023. The prize is the province of Ontario’s leading literary award. You can view the full list of finalists here.

Biblioasis publisher Dan Wells says,

“Mike Barnes has been with the press for the entirety of our twenty-year history, over which time we’ve published nine books with him, including poetry, fiction, fable, and memoir: he never enters the same stream twice. He ranks, in my estimation, as among our very best writers: intelligent, adventurous, unerring, generous, and humane, and it gives me real pleasure that some long overdue acknowledgment has come for Sleep Is Now a Foreign Country, as courageous and felt a book as we’ve been part of at the press. I speak for all of us in offering Mike congratulations, and in thanking the jury for recognizing the astounding work this is.”

Barnes has written eleven books spanning many genres. His last nonfiction book, Be With: Letters to a Caregiver, was praised by Margaret Atwood as “Timely, lyrical, tough, accurate.” His most recent novel, The Adjustment League was a Maclean’s Editor’s Pick described as “masterful.” Barnes was born in Rochester, Minnesota, and he now lives in Toronto.

The Ontario government established the Trillium Book Award in 1987 to recognize excellence and foster increased public awareness of the quality and diversity of Ontario writers and writing. The quality of Ontario authors and writing speaks for itself with the international acclaim achieved by past Trillium winners including Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Timothy Findley and Anne Michaels. The winner of the 2024 Trillium Book Award will be announced at a gala event at the Arcadian Court in Toronto on June 20, 2024, hosted by CBC Anchor Heather Hiscox. More information about the Trillium Book Award can be found here.

Get your copy of Sleep is Now a Foreign Country here!

ABOUT SLEEP IS NOW A FOREIGN COUNTRY

Finalist for the 2024 Trillium Book Award • One of CBC Books’ Canadian Nonfiction to Read in the Fall

A poet recounts his experience with madness and explores the relationship between apprehension and imagination.

In the summer of 1977, standing on a roadside somewhere between Dachau and Munich, twenty-two-year-old Mike Barnes experienced the dawning of the psychic break he’d been anticipating almost all his life. “Times over the years when I have tried to describe what followed,” he writes of that moment, “it has always come out wrong.” In this finely wrought, deeply intelligent memoir of madness, its antecedents and its aftermath, Barnes reconstructs instead what led him to that moment and offers with his characteristic generosity and candor the captivating account of a mind restlessly aware of itself.

ABOUT MIKE BARNES

Mike Barnes is the author of twelve books of poetry, short fiction, novels, and memoir. He has won the Danuta Gleed Award and a National Magazine Award Silver Medal for his short fiction, and the Edna Staebler Award for his photo-and-text essay “Asylum Walk.” His most recent book of nonfiction, Be With: Letters to a Caregiver, was a finalist for the City of Toronto Book Award and has been praised by Margaret Atwood as “Timely, lyrical, tough, accurate.” He lives in Toronto.

COCKTAIL shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award!

We’re pleased to share that this morning, The Writers’ Union of Canada announced the shortlist for the 2023 Danuta Gleed Literary Award, which includes Cocktail by Lisa Alward (Sep 12, 2023)! Check out the full shortlist announcement here.

About Cocktail, the jury praised:

“Lisa Alward’s Cocktail is skilful in its ability to capture the nuance and details of daily life in a way that is striking and deeply felt. With beautiful, precise descriptions and expert pacing, she effortlessly reveals tensions that feel both classic and utterly her own. Exploring the emotional and sexual tensions of couples and families in the Sixties and Seventies, these narratives bring the reader to the core of those unspoken moments, leaving us unsettled. The clarity of sound in Lisa Alward’s sentences—word after word after word—makes it impossible to turn your ear away. This is a quiet voice that booms.”

The 27th annual Danuta Gleed Literary Award recognizes the best first collection of short fiction by a Canadian author published in 2023 in the English language. The Award consists of cash prizes for the three best first collections, with a first prize of $10,000 and two additional prizes of $1,000 each.

The winners will be announced on Tuesday, June 11th at noon EDT on Facebook Live on The Writers’ Union of Canada’s page.

Grab your copy of Cocktail here!

ABOUT COCKTAIL

Longlisted for the 2024 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction • Shortlisted for the New Brunswick 2023 Mrs. Dunster’s Award for Fiction • One of the Globe and Mail’s “Sixty-Two Books to Read This Fall” • Listed in CBC Books Fiction to Read in Fall 2023 • A Miramichi Reader Best Book of 2023 • A Tyee Best Book of 2023

“A writer to watch.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

A girl receives a bedtime visit from a drunken party guest, who will haunt her fantasies for years. A young mother discovers underneath the wallpaper a striking portrait that awakens inconvenient desires. A divorced man distracts himself from the mess he’s made by flirting with a stranger. These intimate, immersive stories explore life’s watershed moments, in which seemingly insignificant details—a pot of hyacinths, a freshly painted yellow wall—and the most chance of encounters come to exert a tidal pull. Set in the swinging sixties and each decade since, Cocktail reveals the schism between the lives we build up around us and our deepest hidden selves.

Credit: Maria Cardosa-Grant

ABOUT LISA ALWARD

Lisa Alward’s short fiction has appeared in The Journey Prize and twice in Best Canadian Stories. She has won the Fiddlehead Prize as well as the Peter Hinchcliffe Fiction Award, has been a finalist for The Malahat Review’s Open Season Award, an honourable mention in the Peter Hinchcliffe Award, and been featured on numerous other long lists, including for the CBC Story Prize and Prism International’s Jacob Zilber Prize (three times). She was born and grew up in Halifax and completed an English degree at the University of Toronto and an MA at Queen Mary College in London, England. In the eighties and early nineties, she worked in book publishing in Toronto, before moving with her young family to Vancouver and ultimately to Fredericton, New Brunswick, where at fifty she began to write stories. Cocktail (Biblioasis), which received a starred review in Kirkus Reviews, is her debut collection.

DREAMING HOME shortlisted for the 2024 Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize!

We’re thrilled to share that this morning, the shortlist for the 2024 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize was announced, which included Dreaming Home by Lucian Childs in the Literary Fiction category! You can view the full shortlist here.

With the tenth annual Emerging Writer Prize, Rakuten Kobo endeavours to raise the profiles of debut authors by recognizing exceptional books written by first-time Canadian authors in three categories: Literary Fiction, Nonfiction, and this year’s type of genre fiction, Mystery.

The winning authors will be announced on June 18, 2024 and awarded a $10,000 CAD cash prize in each category.

Grab your copy of Dreaming Home here!

ABOUT DREAMING HOME

Globe and Mail Best Spring Book • One of Lambda Literary Review‘s Most Anticipated LGBTQ+ Books of June 2023 • A Southern Review Book to Celebrate in June 2023 • A 49th Shelf Best Book of 2023

A queer coming-of-age—and coming-to-terms—follows the after-effects of betrayal and poignantly explores the ways we search for home.

When a sister’s casual act of betrayal awakens their father’s demons—ones spawned by his time in Vietnamese POW camps—the effects of the ensuing violence against her brother ripple out over the course of forty years, from Lubbock, to San Francisco, to Fort Lauderdale. Swept up in this arc, the members of this family and their loved ones tell their tales. A queer coming-of-age, and coming-to-terms, and a poignant exploration of all the ways we search for home, Dreaming Home is the unforgettable story of the fragmenting of an American family.

Photo Credit: Marc Lostracco

ABOUT LUCIAN CHILDS

Lucian Childs has been a Peter Taylor Fellow at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. He is a co-editor of Lambda Literary finalist Building Fires in the Snow: A Collection of Alaska LGBTQ Short Fiction and Poetry. Born in Dallas, Texas, he has lived in Toronto, Ontario, for fifteen years, since 2015 on a permanent basis.

 

ORDINARY WONDER TALES a finalist for the 2023 HILARY WESTON WRITERS’ TRUST PRIZE FOR NONFICTION!

Biblioasis is thrilled to share that Ordinary Wonder Tales by Emily Urquhart (November 1, 2022) has been announced as a finalist for the 2023 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction! You can check out the full shortlist here

The 2023 jury citation for Ordinary Wonder Tales:

Emily Urquhart’s collection of essays about folklore, storytelling, and wonder weaves its own magic as it draws the reader deep into the heart of imagination and possibility. From a haunting childhood encounter to a deeply moving exploration of dementia, Ordinary Wonder Tales delights in the knowledge that the world can be both real and imagined. As we read, we discover that no trauma in a person’s life ever sets them fully apart. Rather, human tragedies are endlessly absorbed and transformed by the wonder tales we share to bring us back to the fullness of life.

“Everyone at Biblioasis is thrilled for Emily,” says Dan Wells, publisher of Biblioasis. “Ordinary Wonder Tales has been a favourite of everyone here at Biblioasis since its publication, a collection open to the everyday magic of everyday life, a book lyrical, meditative, humane and profound. It’s a delightful gathering of essays, and we’re thrilled that the Weston jury felt similarly about it.”

This is the fourth of Biblioasis’ books to be nominated for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction. Reaching Mithymna by Steven Heighton was nominated in 2020, The Great Escape by Andrew Steinmetz was nominated in 2013, and Why Not? Fifteen Reasons to Live by Ray Robertson was nominated in 2011.

The Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction was first awarded in 1997. It is given annually for excellence in the category of literary nonfiction, which includes essays, history, biography, memoir, commentary, and criticism. The winning book demonstrates a distinctive voice, as well as a persuasive and compelling command of tone, narrative, style, and technique. This award has been sponsored by The Hon. Hilary M. Weston since 2011 and is funded this year by the Hilary and Galen Weston Foundation. Beginning in 2023, the prize purse has increased from $60,000 to $75,000. The winner will be announced at the Writers’ Trust Awards on November 21.

Order your copy of Ordinary Wonder Tales here!

ABOUT ORDINARY WONDER TALES

Shortlisted for the 2023 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction

“This book is magical in every sense of the term.”—Amanda Leduc, author of The Centaur’s Wife and Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space

A journalist and folklorist explores the truths that underlie the stories we imagine—and reveals the magic in the everyday.

Photo Credit: Andrew Trant

“I’ve always felt that the term fairy tale doesn’t quite capture the essence of these stories,” writes Emily Urquhart. “I prefer the term wonder tale, which is Irish in origin, for its suggestion of awe coupled with narrative. In a way, this is most of our stories.” In this startlingly original essay collection, Urquhart reveals the truths that underlie our imaginings: what we see in our heads when we read, how the sight of a ghost can heal, how the entrance to the underworld can be glimpsed in an oil painting or a winter storm—or the onset of a loved one’s dementia. In essays on death and dying, pregnancy and prenatal genetics, radioactivity, chimeras, cottagers, and plague, Ordinary Wonder Tales reveals the essential truth: if you let yourself look closely, there is magic in the everyday.

ABOUT EMILY URQUHART

Emily Urquhart is a journalist with a doctorate in folklore. Her award-winning work has appeared in LongreadsGuernica, and The Walrus and elsewhere, and her first book, Beyond the Pale: Folklore, Family, and the Mystery of Our Hidden Genes, was shortlisted for the Kobo First Book Prize and the BC National Award for Canadian Nonfiction. Her most recent book, The Age of Creativity: Art, Memory, my Father and Me, was listed as a top book of 2020 by CBC, NOW Magazine and Quill & Quire. She is a nonfiction editor for The New Quarterly and lives in Kitchener, Ontario.

J.I. Segal Award: Three Questions with Robyn Sarah

Reposted from the J.I. Segal Award website

Poet Robyn Sarah’s memoir, Music, Late and Soon (Biblioasis, 2021) is one of the five nominees for the2022 J.I. Segal Award for the Best Quebec Book on a Jewish Theme. Congratulations, Robyn! The prize is accompanied by an award of $5,000. Music, Late and Soon recounts her return to studying piano with the mentor of her youth. In relating this experience, she reflects on her years spent at Le Conservatoire de musique de Québec studying the clarinet where it seemed clear that her career as an orchestral musician was set. But Sarah was already a writer at heart and this fascinating memoir shows a portrait of an extraordinary piano teacher and of a relationship remembered and renewed.

Congratulations, Robyn, on your work to bring this experience into your writing. It shows us an insight into how creativity is a whole jumble of disciplines, practices, inspirations and experiences. And in order to dive deeper into that question, we asked Robyn the Three Questions and her answers were very thoughtful, detailed and informative.

Three Questions with Robyn Sarah

Question One: What part of the writing process is the most exciting? Starting a project? Finishing it? Editing? Or some other part of the process? Why?

What we call “the writing process” may not divide up into such tidy parts. When exactly does a project start? An idea can germinate at the back of the mind for weeks, months or years before the first sentences get written—and those sentences may prove to be a dead end, or grow into an opening chapter that will ultimately be scrapped. When is a book finished? Months of rewriting (prompted by an editor) can follow delivery of a “final” manuscript that the writer has already put through multiple versions Much of this process is less than exciting. Challenging, yes; compulsively engaging; but also implacably demanding and laborious. Books don’t write themselves; you have to write every word. You are in the grip of something. And all along the way there are self-doubts and misgivings, stalls, wrong turns, detours, patches of fog, impasses.

So where does excitement come in? It, too, can come at any point along the way, but it tends to come in flashes, mini-revelations, moments when something falls magically into place. You are handed a little gift by your subconscious, which has clearly been working on it. Suddenly you see where your story must begin. Suddenly you realize you can connect two images or scenes so each sheds light on the other. Suddenly you hit upon the exact word to describe the expression on somebody’s face, a word you’ve looked for in vain—or you see how to fix an inelegant sentence that has several times defied your efforts to rephrase it to better effect. A seemingly impossible structural problem solves itself when you change the order of a few chapters. Maybe you recognize with a small electric shock that the sentence you’ve just written should be the last sentence in your book—a perfect ending that came to you prematurely. You’re nowhere near the end of the book, but you cut/paste and copy that sentence onto a clean page and save it like treasure. Now you just have to figure out how to get to it.

Question Two: What under-appreciated book or write are you a fan of and why?

Adele Wiseman was not a prolific writer, but she left a small body of highly original work. These days I rarely hear mention of her novels, The Sacrifice (1956) or Crackpot (1974), though the first won a Governor General’s Award when the author was only 28, and the second was a J.I. Segal award winner. Much less known is a book of hers I’ve placed on the “one-of-a-kind” shelf of my bookcase. Published in 1978, a mere 148 pages, Old Woman at Play defies categorization. Its focus is on Wiseman’s mother Chaika in her late years—in particular, on Chaika’s decades-long passion for making dolls out of scraps of fabric and junk, giving each a name, a bit of a history, even a doll companion.

Part memoir, part dialogue, part meditation on creative process, the book is an intimate portrait of an multigenerational family, told largely through scraps of conversation (both remembered and current) between Wiseman and her Ukrainian Jewish parents, living out their last years under their daughter’s roof in Toronto. Her parents reminisce about their old country childhood in Russian villages, their immigration to North America in the 1920s, the long years working day and night as tailor and dressmaker to feed their family in Winnipeg during the Depression. All the while, amid the daily life of her grown daughter’s household, Chaika Waisman’s hands are busy making dolls, and her writer-daughter, fascinated by the profusion and variety of these playful personae, keeps trying to coax out of her mother some explanation of why she makes them and what the activity means to her.

Why do I value this book? I think it’s because it gets at the heart of human creativity better than anything else I’ve read—honouring it without glorifying or falsifying, recognizing it as something not set apart from the rest of life but intrinsically bound up with it. In her mother’s “naive” art, Wiseman finds confirmation “that art, uncapitalized … is our human birthright, the extraordinary right and privilege to share, both as givers and receivers, in the work of continuous creation.”

Question Three: If you weren’t a writer and could do a totally different creative profession, what would it be and why?

From childhood I’ve had two creative passions, writing and music, and all my life I have practiced both. In my early twenties I felt pulled between them. I did not become a professional musician, and for the most part, I have no regrets about that choice. My memoir, Music, Late and Soonwas my attempt to explain to myself why I turned away from music as a career path—why I stopped studying music at twenty-four, and why I returned to it seriously (for its own sake) at nearly sixty.

If I were not a writer and could have a completely different profession, it might not be a creative one at all. I find the whole idea of being a creative “professional’ a thorny one. But if I had to name a third creative art I could study and practice seriously, it would be visual—painting, drawing, or sculpture. I would love to be able to represent the world in visual terms, working with colours, lines, and shapes, and with physical materials, rather than with words, sentences and paragraphs. Words take us into ourselves, into our heads, because we think in words. One thing I love about music is that it’s non-verbal; it takes me out of myself. I think it would be the same with visual art.

The winner of the prize will be announced on Thursday, December 22 at 10am.

Pick up your copy of Music, Late and Soon here!

ABOUT MUSIC, LATE AND SOON

Shortlisted for the J.I. Segal Awards Best Quebec Book on a Jewish Theme • Shortlisted for the The Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-Fiction

A poet rediscovers the artistic passion of her youth—and pays tribute to the teacher she thought she’d lost.

After thirty-five years as an “on-again, off-again, uncoached closet pianist,” poet and writer Robyn Sarah picked up the phone one day and called her old piano teacher, whom she had last seen in her early twenties. Music, Late and Soon is the story of her return to studying piano with the mentor of her youth. In tandem, she reflects on a previously unexamined musical past: a decade spent at Quebec’s Conservatoire de Musique, studying clarinet—ostensibly headed for a career as an orchestral musician, but already a writer at heart. A meditation on creative process in both music and literary art, this two-tiered musical autobiography interweaves past and present as it tracks the author’s long-ago defection from a musical career path and her late re-embrace of serious practice. At its core is a portrait of an extraordinary piano teacher and of a relationship remembered and renewed.

ABOUT ROBYN SARAH

Robyn Sarah is the author of eleven collections of poems, two collections of short stories, a book of essays on poetry, and a memoir, Music, Late and Soon. Her tenth poetry collection, My Shoes Are Killing Me, won the Governor General’s Award in 2015. In 2017 Biblioasis published a forty-year retrospective, Wherever We Mean to Be: Selected Poems, 1975-2015. Sarah’s poems have been anthologized in The Norton Anthology of Poetry and have been broadcast by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac. From 2011 until 2020 she served as poetry editor for Cormorant Books. She has lived for most of her life in Montréal.

CASE STUDY shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize!

We’re excited to share that Case Study by Graeme Macrae Burnet (November 1, 2022) has been shortlisted for the 2022 Gordon Burn Prize! Check out the full shortlist here.

The Gordon Burn Prize judges statement:

“A twisting and often wickedly humorous work of crime fiction that meditates on the nature of sanity, identity and truth itself.”

Case Study was published in the UK in 2021, and has received wide acclaim since its release. The novel has been shortlisted for the Ned Kelly International Crime Prize, and more recently longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize.

Biblioasis is a literary press based in Windsor, Ontario. Since 2004 we have published the best in contemporary fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and literature in translation.

The Gordon Burn Prize was launched in 2012 to remember the late author of novels including Fullalove and Born Yesterday: The News as a Novel, and non-fiction including Happy Like Murderers: The Story of Fred and Rosemary West and Best and Edwards: Football, Fame and Oblivion. The prize is run in partnership by the Gordon Burn Trust, New Writing North, Faber & Faber and Durham Book Festival, and seeks to celebrate the writing of those whose work follows in his footsteps. The winner will be announced on October 13, and will receive a cheque for £5,000 and be offered the opportunity to undertake a writing retreat of up to three months at Gordon Burn’s cottage in Berwickshire in the Scottish Borders.

Preorder your copy of Case Study here!

ABOUT CASE STUDY

Shortlisted for the 2022 Gordon Burn Prize • Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2022

The Booker-shortlisted author of His Bloody Project blurs the lines between patient and therapist, fiction and documentation, and reality and dark imagination. 

London, 1965. An unworldly young woman believes that a charismatic psychotherapist, Collins Braithwaite, has driven her sister to suicide. Intent on confirming her suspicions, she assumes a false identity and presents herself to him as a client, recording her experiences in a series of notebooks. But she soon finds herself drawn into a world in which she can no longer be certain of anything. Even her own character.

In Case Study, Graeme Macrae Burnet presents these notebooks interspersed with his own biographical research into Collins Braithwaite. The result is a dazzling—and often wickedly humorous—meditation on the nature of sanity, identity and truth itself, by one of the most inventive novelists writing today.

ABOUT GRAEME MACRAE BURNET

Graeme Macrae Burnet is among Scotland’s leading contemporary novelists. Best known for his dazzling Booker-shortlisted second novel, His Bloody Project (2015), he is also the author of two Simenon-influenced novels: The Disappearance of Adele Bedeau (2014) and The Accident on the A35 (2017). Burnet has appeared at literary festivals in Australia, the USA, Germany, India, Russia, Spain, France, Korea, Denmark and Estonia. His novels have been translated into more than twenty languages and achieved bestseller status in several countries. He lives and works in Glasgow.

ROMANTIC shortlisted for the DEREK WALCOTT POETRY PRIZE

We’re pleased to share that Romantic by Mark Callanan (October 12, 2021) has been shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry!

The Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry is presented by Arrowsmith Press, in partnership with The Derek Walcott Festival in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, and the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, and is awarded to a full-length book of poems by a non-US citizen published in the previous calendar year. This year’s judge is Carolyn Forché.

The prize includes a $1,000 cash award, along with a reading at the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre in Boston. Winners will be announced on October 13, 2022.

Get your copy of Romantic here!

ABOUT ROMANTIC

A CBC Best Canadian Poetry Book of 2021

Drawing on Arthurian myth, the Romantic poets, the ill-fated “Great War” efforts of the Newfoundland Regiment, modern parenthood, 16-bit video games, and Major League Baseball, these poems examine the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, both as individuals and as communities, in order to explain how and why we are the way we are. At its heart, Romantic interrogates our western society’s idealized, self-deluding personal and cultural perspectives.

ABOUT MARK CALLANAN

Mark Callanan is the author of two previous poetry collections, Gift Horse (Véhicule Press, 2011) and Scarecrow (Killick Press, 2003), as well as two poetry chapbooks, Skylarking (Anstruther Press, 2020) and Sea Legend (Frog Hollow Press, 2010). He was a founding editor of the St. John’s-based literary journal Riddle Fence, and co-edited The Breakwater Book of Contemporary Newfoundland Poetry (Breakwater Books, 2013). He lives in St. John’s with his wife, poet and critic Andreae Callanan, and their four children.

MURDER ON THE INSIDE a finalist for The Crime Writers of Canada Awards of Excellence!

Catherine Fogarty’s Murder on the Inside: The True Story of the Deadly Riot at Kingston Penitentiary (April 13, 2021) has been named a finalist for The Brass Knuckles Award for Best Nonfiction Crime Book, presented by the Crime Writers of Canada! The award is sponsored by Simpson & Wellenreiter LLP, and comes with a $300 prize. Winners will be announced on May 26th, 2022.

You can see the full list of finalists here.

Get your copy of Murder on the Inside here!

Murder on the Inside coverABOUT MURDER ON THE INSIDE

Shortlisted for The Brass Knuckles Award for Best Nonfiction Crime Book

“You have taken our civil rights—we want our human rights.”

On April 14, 1971, a handful of prisoners attacked the guards at Kingston Penitentiary and seized control, making headlines around the world. For four intense days, the prisoners held the guards hostage while their leaders negotiated with a citizens’ committee of journalists and lawyers, drawing attention to the dehumanizing realities of their incarceration, including overcrowding, harsh punishment and extreme isolation. But when another group of convicts turned their pent-up rage towards some of the weakest prisoners, tensions inside the old stone walls erupted, with tragic consequences. As heavily armed soldiers prepared to regain control of the prison through a full military assault, the inmates were finally forced to surrender.

Murder on the Inside tells the harrowing story of a prison in crisis against the backdrop of a pivotal moment in the history of human rights. Occurring just months before the uprising at Attica Prison, the Kingston riot has remained largely undocumented, and few have known the details—yet the tense drama chronicled here is more relevant today than ever. A gripping account of the standoff and the efforts for justice and reform it inspired, Murder on the Inside is essential reading for our times.

ABOUT CATHERINE FOGARTY

Photo Credit: Margot Daley

Catherine Fogarty is a storyteller. She is the founder and president of Big Coat Media, with offices in Toronto, Los Angeles, Vancouver, and North Carolina. An accomplished television producer, writer and director, Catherine has produced award-winning lifestyle, reality and documentary series for both Canadian and American networks.

Catherine is the executive producer of the Gemini nominated series Love It or List It. In addition to that franchise, Catherine has produced several other lifestyle and documentary series including Animal Magnetism (W Network), My Parents’ House (HGTV), and Paranormal Home Inspectors (Investigative Discovery Canada). Catherine also produced and directed I Don’t Have Time for This, an intimate documentary about young women with breast cancer.

Originally trained as a social worker, Catherine studied deviance and criminology. She worked with numerous at-risk populations including street youth, people with AIDS, abused women, and social services.

Catherine holds an M.A. in Social Work, an MBA in Human Resource Management, and an MFA in Creative Non-Fiction from the University of Kings College. She was recently awarded the Marina Nemet Award in Creative Writing through the University of Toronto.