Fiction (adult)

Shandi Mitchell

Shandi Mitchell is an author and filmmaker. Her debut novel Under This Unbroken Sky was simultaneously published by Penguin Canada, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (UK) and Harper Collins (US). It has sold in nine countries, including translation rights for Chinese, Hebrew, Dutch and Italian. Under This Unbroken Sky won the 2010 Commonwealth regional Prize for First Book (Canada/Caribbean), the Thomas Head Raddall Fiction Award, and the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award. Her award-winning short films and feature film, The Disappeared, have played worldwide and garnered awards in cinematography, design, sound, performance, and direction. In 2008, she was awarded the Canada Council’s Victor Martin-Lynch Staunton Endowment in Media Arts. She has taught Introductory Screenwriting, Directing, and Fiction Writing Workshops. She has been a mentor for the AFCOOP and WFNS programs and a script consultant for Equinoxe International. She is currently teaching 4th year Creative Writing-Fiction at Dalhousie University, while completing her next novel.

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William Kowalski

William Kowalski is the author of six works of literary fiction and six Rapid Reads for Reluctant Readers. His work has been translated into over a dozen languages and has appeared on numerous international and regional best-seller lists, including the #5 spot on the Times of London (Eddie’s Bastard). He is the 2001 winner of Exclusive Books’ Ama-Boeke Award (South Africa), was thrice nominated for the Ontario Library Association’s Golden Oak Award, and won the 2014 Thomas H. Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award.

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Bob Kroll

Bob Kroll has been writing professionally for more than thirty-five years. His work includes books, stage plays, radio dramas, TV documentaries, as well as historical docu-dramas for Canadian and American museums. He lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Born New Haven, CT. Graduated Providence College and St. Thomas University.

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Kathy-Diane Leveille

Kathy-Diane Leveille is a former broadcast journalist with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, who discovered the only thing more thrilling than reading a great suspense novel is trying to write one. Her short story collection, Roads Unravelling (Sumach Press), was published to critical acclaim after a selection from its pages Learning to Spin was adapted to radio drama for CBC’s Summer Drama Festival. The tale Showdown at the Four Corner’s Corral was revised for the stage and performed by New City Theater in Saint John. Her debut suspense novel, Let the Shadows Fall Behind You, was published by Kunati Books April 2009. Standing in the Whale’s Jaw followed in 2013 from Tightrope Books. She is a member of Sisters in Crime, Crime Writers of Canada and the TWUC.

Kathy-Diane’s prose has been published in a number of literary journals including Grain, Room of One’s Own, Oklahoma Review, Pottersfield Portfolio and The Cormorant, as well as various anthologies such as Water Studies: New Voices in Maritime Fiction (Pottersfield Press) and New Brunswick Short Stories (Neptune). Along with being awarded numerous Canada Council Art Grants, Kathy-Diane’s fiction won the Short Grain Contest (dramatic monologue) in 2000 and was listed as a finalist in the Writers’ Union of Canada Short Fiction Contest in 2002. Her poetry received Honorable Mention in the Stephen Leacock International Poetry Competition. A humorous commentary I Know What You Didn’t Do Last Summer aired on CBC’s national morning show with Shelagh Rogers.

“Her settings and characters – their hopes and fears, verbal and behavioural ticks, even their smells – are keenly observed.” – The Globe and Mail

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Linda Little

Linda Little’s most recent novel is Grist (Roseway 2014). Her first children’s picture book, Work and More Work, was published by Groundwood in 2015. Her previous work includes two award-winning novels: Scotch River (Penguin 2006) and Strong Hollow (Goose Lane 2001). She has published short stories in many reviews and anthologies, including The Antigonish Review, Descant, Matrix, The Journey Prize Anthology, and The Penguin Book of Short Stories by Canadian Women. She teaches seasonally at the Dalhousie University Agricultural Campus.

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Bretton Loney

Bretton Loney is a novelist and non-fiction writer who has published three novels and one biography. His 2015 biography, Rebel With A Cause: The Doc Nikaido Story, and his first novel, The Last Hockey Player, a dystopian story published in 2018, were nominated for Whistler Independent Book Awards.

In 2022 he published the novel Joe Howe’s Ghost, a paranormal political thriller.

In 2025 Bretton independently published his third novel, Unsettling Time, a murder mystery set in 1749 amid the first days of the new colony of Halifax.

Bretton is a native of Bow Island, Alberta and has undergraduate degrees from the University of Lethbridge and the University of King’s College in Halifax. He lives in Halifax with his wife, Karen Shewbridge.

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Frank Macdonald

Frank Macdonald is a writer living with his partner, artist Virginia McCoy, in his hometown of Inverness, Cape Breton, returning there after fulfilling his mandatory tour of duty in plants, factories, construction work and fast food cooking in other parts of North America. He earns his living as a columnist and reporter with The Inverness Oran, a weekly newspaper, and has won journalism awards for both his humourous/satirical weekly columns and his editorial writing.

When not escaping into the works of other writers, Frank tackles his literary interests, most notably the novel. His first novel, A Forest for Calum (Cape Breton University Press) was published in 2005, and was nominated for the Dartmouth Book Award, and was long-listed for IMPAC-Dublin Award. His second novel, A Possible Madness (Cape Breton University Press-2012) was nominated for Dartmouth Book Award and was also long-listed for the IMPAC-Dublin Award.

In 2010 Cape Breton University Press published a children’s novella, T.R.’s Adventure at Angus the Wheeler’s, illustrated by artist Virginia McCoy.

In 2011, his one-act play, Her Wake won Best Canadian Production at the Liverpool International Theatre Festival.

In 2014, his third novel, Tinker & Blue was published (Cape Breton University Press).

He has also published two collections of newspaper/magazine columns, Assuming I’m Right (Cecibu 1990) and How To Cook Your Cat (Cecibu-2003). In 1992-4 Mulgrave Road Theatre produced and toured a one-man play written by Macdonald depicting a day in the life of a newspaper columnist, based on the first collection of columns and also titled Assuming I’m Right.

Macdonald has also had poems published in a number of journals, as well a short stories, and song lyrics have been arranged and recorded by musicians. Frank has given public reading on numerous occasions for numerous occasions ranging from the CBC to the school classroom.

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Josh MacDonald (he/him)

JOSH MacDONALD (he/him) is the writer of a theatrical adaptation for Robert Cormier’s classic novel I Am The Cheese. This adaptation is the winner of a Playwrights Guild of Canada Tom Hendy Prize, as well as a Theatre Nova Scotia Merritt Award for Outstanding Adaptation. Josh is also the writer of the stage plays Halo, Whereverville and The Mystery Play, which have been produced here at home and around North America, are published by Talonbooks, and are curriculum titles in high schools and universities. Josh is the winner of an AMD/Dell “Next Wave” Award for Best Screenplay from Fantastic Fest in Austin, TX, for his horror movie The Corridor (IFC Films). He is also the writer of the feature comedy Faith, Fraud & Minimum Wage (eOne Films). Josh writes for series television, is an actor for stage and screen, and has taught playwriting and screenwriting courses for Dalhousie University and the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design (NSCAD).

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Susan Kerslake

Born in Chicago in 1943, Susan immigrated to Canada in 1966 and now lives in Halifax.

She has worked in a bookstore, the Killam Library at Dalhousie University, as a child care worker at St Joseph’s Children’s Centre, and in Child Life at the I.W.K. Grace Hospital for Children. She has worked as a volunteer with children with cystic fibrosis for over 20 years.

“Seasoning Fever is Little House on the Prairie had it been written by Annie Proulx, Wallace Stegner or Cormac McCarthy. In limpid, dreamlike prose, Susan Kerslake serves up an epic myth of the West with perceptiveness both wise and innocent. All of life’s elemental zest is here: deprivation and survival, love and lust, the magical and the mundane and the sometimes unbridgeable distance between male and female. No simple tale of prairie homesteading, this long-awaited novel imposes the ingenuous resource of a soaring poetic mind upon the grass ocean of an inscrutable land. If the measure of such fusion is an assessment of spirit, then the spirit of Seasoning Fever is original and triumphant.” – Richard Cumyn

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Stephen Kimber

STEPHEN KIMBER is an award-winning writer, editor and broadcaster. He is the author of 13 books, including two novels and nine works of nonfiction:

Bitcoin Widow: Love, Betrayal and the Missing Millions (HarperCollins, 2022) (with Jennifer Robertson);
Alexa! Changing the Face of Canadian Politics (Goose Lane 2021);
The Sweetness in the Lime: A Novel (Vagrant 2020);
What Lies Across the Water: The Real Story of the Cuban Five (Fernwood 2013);
Halifax: Warden of the North, 2nd Edition (Nimbus 2010) (with Thomas Raddall);
IWK: A Century of Caring (Nimbus 2009);
Loyalists and Layabouts: The Rapid Rise and Faster Fall of Shelburne, Nova Scotia, 1783-1792 (Doubleday 2008);
Reparations: A Novel (HarperCollins, 2006);
Sailors, Slackers and Blind Pigs: Halifax at War (Doubleday 2002);
NOT GUILTY: The Trial of Gerald Regan (Stoddart 1999);
Flight 111: The Tragedy of the Swissair Crash (Doubleday 1999; updated 2nd edition, Nimbus, 2013);
More Than Just Folks (Pottersfield 1996);
The Spirit of Africville (Formac 1992) (Co-author);
and Net Profits (Nimbus 1990).

His What Lies Across the Water: The Real Story of the Cuban Five, is a narrative nonfiction account of Cuban intelligence agents arrested in Florida in 1998 and sentenced to long terms in prison in the United States. Following its publication, Kimber toured extensively in the United States and Canada to discuss the book and the case, including meeting with members of the U.S. Congress and officials at the State Department. On December 17, 2014, the three members of the Cuban Five still in prison were released as part of an historic rapprochement between the U.S. and Cuba. Cuban officials have said Kimber’s book played a significant role in winning freedom for the Five.

Kimber’s journalism has appeared in almost all major Canadian publications including Canadian Geographic, Financial Post Magazine, Report on Business Magazine, The Literary Review of Canada, Maclean’s, Canadian Business, En Route, Chatelaine, Financial Times, The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star and National Post, as well as internationally in the Washington Post, Counterpunch, Progreso Weekly and the Huffington Post. For 16 years, he was a political and general interest columnist for the Daily News in Halifax.

He is currently a weekly columnist for The Halifax Examiner and a Contributing Editor for Atlantic Business Magazine.

As a broadcaster, he has been an Ottawa-based current affairs producer for the CTV Television Network and a producer, writer, story editor and host for numerous CBC television and radio programs. His work has appeared on national programs ranging from television’s Rough Cuts to radio’s Sunday Morning.

He has also produced a number of commissioned works, including Net Profits; The Report of the Royal Commission on the Donald Marshall, Jr. Prosecution; IWK: A Century of Caring; and 150 Years in the History of a Law Firm (McInnes Cooper). Awards:

What Lies was long-listed for a Libris Award for the Best Nonfiction Book published in Canada in 2013 and won the Evelyn Richardson Award for Nonfiction at the 2014 East Coast Literary Awards. In 2016, the Spanish translation of the book won the Readers’ Choice Award from the Cuban Institute of the Book as one of that year’s 10 best-selling books in Cuba. The book has also been translated into German and Serbian editions.

Sailors, Slackers, and Blind Pigs, a look at life in Halifax during World War II, won the Evelyn Richardson Nonfiction Prize, the Dartmouth Book Award for Nonfiction and a Torgi Award, and was a finalist for the Atlantic Booksellers’ Choice Award.

Loyalists and Layabouts was short-listed for both the 2009 Dartmouth Book Award for Nonfiction and the Edith Richardson Nonfiction Prize. His novel Reparations was short-listed for the Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction and the Crime Writers of Canada Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Novel.

He has also won:

a Dan McArthur Award for excellence in radio documentary production,
a regional ACTRA award for documentary writing,
a Canadian Food Writers’ Award for the best magazine article on the Canadian Food Industry,
a National Author’s Award for Best Business Magazine article,
an Honourable Mention from the Centre for Investigative Reporting for investigative reporting,
more than two dozen Gold and Silver awards from the Atlantic Journalism Awards for writing,
a Silver Medal for Commentary and was a finalist on several occasions for National Magazine Awards in a variety of categories, including Best Overall Article, Column, and Religious Journalism,
and a 2002 Queen’s Golden Jubilee Medal for his contribution to public life.

Since 1983, he has taught journalism at the University of King’s College, where he specializes in creative nonfiction, and co-founded the university’s Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction program in 2013. From 1996 to 2003, in 2007-08 and again in 2013-14, he served as Director of the School of Journalism.

In 1998-99, he was selected as a Research Fellow with the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg, Florida.

In 2001, he completed a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction degree at Goucher College in Baltimore, MD.

He and his wife, former film and television costume designer and wardrobe consultant Jeanie Kimber, live in Halifax. They have three grown children.

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