The Atlantic Book Awards — an annual awards conglomerate of 11 awards, ranging from fiction to poetry to children’s to non-fiction to bookseller’s choice — were awarded last night. (For the shortlists, click here). The awards involving fiction and poetry are listed below.

Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award : Under This Unbroken Sky by Shandi Mitchell

The Thomas Head Raddall Award is a 15,000$ prestigious award is for “the best work of adult fiction published in the previous year by an Atlantic Canadian Writer,” and is awarded by Writers’ Trust of Canada and the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia.

John and Margaret Savage First Book Award: Under This Unbroken Sky by Shandi Mitchell

The John and Margaret Savage First Book Award is given out to  “the best first book of fiction or non-fiction published in the previous year by an Atlantic Canadian author.”

Backcover Summary: In the spring of 1937, Teodor Mykolayenko returns to his struggling family after a year spent in prison for the crime of trying to feed them. His wife and children have been living under the care of his sister Anna on the harsh and unforgiving prairie landscape. A survivor of war, labour camp, and Stalin’s crimes in Ukraine, Teodor is determined to make a new life for his family, and so he takes to the land with desperation and resolve … A novel about family, struggle, survival, and the resiliency of the human spirit, Under This Unbroken Sky is an emotionally resonant tale told with cinematic aplomb by a passionate new storyteller.

- Winner of the 2010 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, Caribbean and Canada Best First Book!

- Now a National Bestseller.

Atlantic Independent Booksellers’ Choice Award: The Bishop’s Man by Linden MacIntyre

Each year, a call for nominations is sent out to members of the Atlantic Independent Booksellers’ Association, asking for their top three books. The three most-nominated titles make up the shortlist, which is then sent out to the booksellers to vote on.

The Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction: The Bishop’s Man by Linden MacIntyre

Awarded to ”the best books published the previous year in celebration of Nova Scotia and its people.”

Backcover Summary: The year is 1993 and Father Duncan MacAskill stands at a small Cape Breton fishing harbour a few miles from where he grew up. Enjoying the timeless sight of a father and son piloting a boat, Duncan takes a moment’s rest from his worries. But he does not yet know that his already strained faith is about to be tested by his interactions with a troubled boy, 18-year-old Danny MacKay. Known to fellow priests as the “Exorcist” because of his special role as clean-up man for the Bishop of Antigonish, Duncan has a talent for coolly reassigning deviant priests while ensuring minimal fuss from victims and their families. It has been a lonely vocation, but Duncan is generally satisfied that his work is a necessary defense of the church. All this changes when lawyers and a policeman snoop too close for the bishop’s comfort. Duncan is assigned a parish in the remote Cape Breton community of Creignish and told to wait it out …

- Winner of the 2009 Giller Prize!

Atlantic Poetry Prize:  Lean-To by Tonja Gunvaldsen Klaasse  

Awarded to ”the best work of poetry published in the previous year by an Atlantic Canadian poet.”

Backcover Summary: In her third book of poetry, Tonja Gunvaldsen Klaassen writes of places made home, navigating between fixed points of origin and the flotsam that encloses, between the longevity of marriage and parenthood, and the temporary of camping trips, renovations and hospital stays. Across the collection, the poet’s lyricism finds a lilt and repetition that firmly pegs while leaving one side open to the unlikely and unexpected. “Where,” Gunvaldsen Klaassen asks, “are the leaps of logic and leaps of faith that come with the constant necessary distractions of life with little kids taking me? Things seem to be always at more than one place at a time. We’d moved from Saskatchewan to Nova Scotia and were lost. I needed some kind of return – a long poem, repetitions, something sustaining although provisional. We bought an old house and moved in; we drove out to sea – or were sometimes driven out by ghosts or neighbours, accidents, invitations, bad luck. I wrote in a tent, I wrote in the car. And thought about the generous, endlessly generative absurdity of marriage (one plus one equals two, and one plus one also equals one). And what if you live in a marriage plus kids? I guess living with mess and emptiness, with daily repetitions that comfort but also drive you crazy, with internal rhymes that unify and imply trouble, living ‘in the midst of’ is to glimpse home as a (changeable) state of mind and being.”