The Cabot Trail Writers Festival is delighted to host a reading, conversation and audience Q&A with the three authors nominated for the 2025 Alistair MacLeod Prize for Short Fiction: Allison Graves (Soft Serve), Amanda Peters (Waiting for the Long Night Moon) and Susie Taylor (Vigil).
The evening will be hosted by author Alexander MacLeod. We’re very pleased to bring these three extraordinary writers (see below for their bios) together to share their work and celebrate their nomination for an Atlantic Book Award particularly dear to Cape Breton hearts, named in honour of one of our most beloved authors.
This is the first year our organization has had the honour of administering this award (in partnership with Atlantic Book Awards, with prize funding generously donated by Bookmark Booksellers Inc.), in memory of one of the great writers of our island, a master of the short-fiction form. We cannot imagine three finer writers to carry forward Alistair MacLeod's legacy.
This event will be pay-what-you-can (recommended: $15). All proceeds will go towards the award and event costs. Books will be available for sale, a cash bar will be open, and light refreshments will be served. Our thanks to the Inverness County Centre for the Arts for generously opening their doors to welcome us into their space to share this beautiful evening of laughter, inspiration and stories...
Allison Graves received her BA in English literature from Dalhousie University and her MA in creative writing from Memorial University, where she wrote Soft Serve. Her fiction has won Room magazine’s annual fiction contest and the Newfoundland Arts and Letters Award. She is the current fiction editor of Riddle Fence. She is doing a PhD at Memorial and likes to play drums and climb Signal Hill.
Amanda Peters is a writer of Mi'kmaq and settler ancestry. Her debut novel, The Berry Pickers, was a critically acclaimed bestseller in Canada. She is the winner of the 2021 Indigenous Voices Award for unpublished prose and a participant in the 2021 Writers’ Trust Rising Stars Program. Amanda Peters lives and writes in the Annapolis Valley, Nova Scotia, with her fur babies, Holly and Pook.
Susie Taylor is a queer writer living in rural Newfoundland. Her first novel, Even Weirder Than Before, was published in 2019 by Breakwater Books. Taylor’s short stories have appeared in Geist, Prism International, The Fiddlehead, Room Magazine, Riddle Fence and elsewhere. Taylor lives in Harbour Grace, Newfoundland and Labrador, with her partner, dog and four cats. When she isn’t writing, she is out running.