Our Book for June

The Wreckage

By Michael Crummey

Copies have been ordered from : The Downtown Bookstore (Owen Sound)

Michael Crummey (born November 18, 1965) is a Canadian writer.

Born in Buchans, Newfoundland and Labrador, Crummey grew up there and in Wabush, Labrador, where he moved with his family in the late 1970s. He began to write poetry while studying at Memorial University in St. John's, where he received a B.A. in English in 1987. He completed a M.A. at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, in 1988, then dropped out of the Ph.D. program to pursue his writing career. Crummey returned to St. John's in 2001.

Since first winning Memorial University's Gregory J. Power Poetry Contest in 1986, Crummey has continued to receive accolades for his poetry and prose. In 1994, he became the first winner of the Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award for young unpublished writers, and his first volume of poetry, Arguments with Gravity (1996), won the Writer's Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador Book Award for Poetry. Hard Light (1998), his second collection, was nominated for the Milton Acorn People's Poetry Award in 1999. 1998 also saw the publication of a collection of short stories, Flesh and Blood, and Crummey's nomination for the Journey Prize.

Crummey's debut novel, River Thieves (2001) became a Canadian bestseller, winning the Thomas Head Raddall Award, the Winterset Award for Excellence in Newfoundland Writing, and the Atlantic Independent Booksellers' Choice Award. It was also shortlisted for the Giller Prize, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the Books in Canada First Novel Award, and the IMPAC Award. His second novel, The Wreckage (2005), has been longlisted for the 2007 IMPAC Award.

Crummey's writing often draws on the history and landscape of Newfoundland and Labrador. The poems and prose in Hard Light are inspired by the stories of his father and other relatives, and the short stories in Flesh and Blood take place in the fictional mining community of Black Rock, which strongly resembles Buchans. Crummey's novels in particular can be described as historical fiction. River Thieves details the contact and conflict between European settlers and the last of the Beothuk in the early 19th century, including the capture of Demasduwit. The Wreckage tells the story of young Newfoundland soldier Wish Fury and his beloved Sadie Parsons during and after World War II.