The Grand Finale!
Main Stage closes out the 2022 Read by the Sea literary festival on Saturday, July 2 with four of Canada’s literary greats. The featured authors for 2022 are Nova Scotian poet, author and historian Dr. Afua Cooper; Giller Prize-winning Ontario novelist, essayist and memoirist Lawrence Hill; Cape Breton novelist Morgan Murray; and Nova Scotian journalist and non-fiction author Jon Tattrie. Watch this page for more information about this stellar line-up.
Have you read works by any of our featured authors? Recommend their poetry, prose, and creative non-fiction to other Read by the Sea enthusiasts by sending us your reader reviews. We’ll share them here as part of this year’s festival (using only your first name and your province/territory or country of residence). Submit your reviews (250-word maximum) using the Contact Us form.
Lawrence Hill
LAWRENCE HILL is the award-winning and internationally bestselling author of ten books of fiction and nonfiction, including The Book of Negroes, which was made into a six-part TV mini-series, and The Illegal, both of which won CBC Canada Reads. His previous novels, Some Great Thing and Any Known Blood, became national bestsellers. Hill’s nonfiction work includes Blood: The Stuff of Life, the subject of his 2013 Massey Lectures, and the memoir Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada. In January 2022, HarperCollins Canada will publish Hill’s eleventh book -- the novel Beatrice and Croc Harry.
Hill’s volunteer work has included Crossroads International, the Black Loyalist Heritage Society, Book Clubs for Inmates, The Ontario Black History Society, and Walls to Bridges – a non-profit group offering university courses to incarcerated Canadians. A professor of creative writing at the University of Guelph, he has spent more than a decade volunteering in book clubs in federal penitentiaries. Through Walls to Bridges, he taught a third-year undergraduate memoir writing course to women incarcerated in the Grand Valley Institution for Women in Kitchener ON.
Currently, Hill is writing screenplays for a TV miniseries in development, as well as a new novel about the thousands of African-American soldiers who travelled from military bases in the Deep South to help build the Alaska Highway in northern British Columbia and Yukon during World War Two. He is a member of the Order of Canada, and a winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and (for screenwriting) a co-winner of the NAACP Award and a Canadian Screen Award. He lives with his wife, the writer Miranda Hill, in Hamilton ON and in Woody Point, NL.
Jon Tattrie
Jon Tattrie is an award-winning author and journalist. As an author, he’s published two novels and six non-fiction books, including Peace By Chocolate, The Hermit of Africville and Dan Paul: Mi’kmaw Elder. He’s now writing Sword and Soul: How an American Exile Rewrote Fantasy, a biography of the late Charles R. Saunders.
As a journalist, he works for CBC, specializing in historic news, such as the 1969 tragedy aboard Bluenose 2, and the discovery of an anchor in Halifax harbour connected to the Halifax Explosion.
He lives in Halifax with his wife Giselle and their children, Roslyn and Xavier.
Morgan Murray
Morgan Murray (he/him) is a settler from the same backwoods central Alberta village as figure-skating legend Kurt Browning (Caroline, AB in Treaty 6 territory). He now lives in the backwoods of Cape Breton (Unama'ki) with his wife, cartoonist Kate Beaton, and growing family. In between, he has been a rancher, a roustabout, a reporter, a tour guide, a schemer, a variety show host, and a student in Caroline, Calgary, Paris, Prague, Montreal, Chicoutimi, and St. John's. His first novel, Dirty Birds has been compared to Kurt Vonnegut, and has been a finalist for the Leacock Medal for Humour, longlisted for CBC Canada Reads 2021, a finalist for three Atlantic Book Awards (winning the Best Atlantic Published Book) and the ReLit Awards, and won silver in the 2020 International Forewords Indies Award for Humour.
Afua Cooper
Afua Cooper, Halifax’s seventh Poet Laureate, is the author of five books of poetry, including the critically acclaimed Copper Woman and Other Poems and two novels, The Hanging of Angelique: The Untold Story of Slavery in Canada and the Burning of Old Montreal, and My Name is Phillis Wheatley. She has also recorded two poetry CDs, including the forthcoming Love and Revolution. A founder of the Canadian Dub poetry movement, Afua Cooper was instrumental in organizing between 2004 and 2009, three international dub poetry festivals.
Pasha Malla
PASHA MALLA is the author of five works of poetry and fiction, including the story collection The Withdrawal Method and the novel People Park. His fiction has won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, the Trillium Book Prize, an Arthur Ellis Award and several National Magazine awards. His work has also been long-listed for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Pasha’s latest novel, Kill the Mall, was released in February 2021.
Stephen Maher
The Writers Workshop "Fiction Thrillers" will be led by Stephen Maher, a journalist and novelist originally from Truro, Nova Scotia. Steve is an interviewer for the 2021 MainStage. An award-winning investigative journalist and political columnist, he is the author of three novels, Deadline, Salvage and Social Misconduct. He makes his home on the South Shore of Nova Scotia.
Suzanne Stewart
Suzanne Stewart’s writing has appeared in The Dalhousie Review, The Goose, The Globe and Mail, Saltscapes Magazine, The Antigonish Review, English Studies, Essays on Canadian Writing, The Craft Factor, and Newest Review. She has published a creative non-fiction book, The Tides of Time: A Nova Scotia Book of Seasons (Pottersfield 2018). Having completed an MFA in Creative Nonfiction and a PhD in English literature, Suzanne currently teaches at St. Francis Xavier University. Read by the Sea welcomes Suzanne as a MainStage interviewer.
Lana MacEachern
Lana MacEachern is a library technician and former journalist/columnist whose work has appeared in Nova Scotian daily and weekly newspapers and The Seniors' Advocate. A longtime Read by the Sea fan and frequent festival interviewer, she is now a member of the festival's organizing committee. Lana writes poetry and creative non-fiction and is working up the courage to submit her work to literary journals. She lives on Nova Scotia's Northumberland shore.