11 April 2006
Harry Thurston Shortlisted
for Atlantic Poetry Prize

This weekend the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia released the shortlists for the 2006 Atlantic Book Awards. Gaspereau Press is pleased to announce that Harry Thurston’s A Ship Portrait (Gaspereau Press, 2005) has been shortlisted for the Atlantic Poetry Prize. Fellow nominees are Anne Compton for Processional (Fitzhenry & Whiteside) and Robin McGrath for Covenant of Salt (Creative Book Publishing). The prize is one of nine Atlantic Book Awards given each year to recognize literary excellence in the Atlantic region.

The winners of the Atlantic Book Awards will be announced in a ceremony to be held at 4:00 pm on 28 April 2006 at Alderney Landing Theatre in Dartmouth. The ceremony is one of the highlights of this year’s Atlantic Book Festival, to take place April 24–29. For more information about the awards and other festival events, please visit www.writers.ns.ca

BACKGROUND
Gaspereau Press is a literary publisher and printer based in Kentville, Nova Scotia. The press is committed to literature and the book arts, incorporating a range of modern and antique forms of printing and binding to create books that are distinctive in manufacture and design. Its publications have won numerous awards, including the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Alberta Book Award for fiction, the A.M Klein Prize for poetry and the Alcuin Award for excellence in book design.

A Ship Portrait is a tribute to the life and art of John O’Brien, nineteenth-century painter of ships, written in what Harry Thurston calls “a novella in verse.” Built upon two voices, O’Brien’s and the poet’s, the poem traces the painter’s life in Halifax during the apex and decline of the Golden Age of Sail. Thurston characterizes this era in Nova Scotia’s history as a time of shifting mythologies, of strife between Old World and New, and of a surprisingly cosmopolitan lifestyle sustained by the shipping industry. The poem’s two halves embody the crossovers between art and history, and how each shapes our perception of the other.

Harry Thurston is the author of several collections of poetry, including If Men Lived On Earth (Gaspereau Press, 2000). He has travelled widely as a freelance writer for many of North America’s leading magazines, including Audubon and National Geographic. His A Place Between the Tides was shortlisted for the 2004 Drainie-Taylor biography prize and the Dartmouth Book Award. Thurston lives in Tidnish Bridge, Nova Scotia.

For more information contact Beth Crosby
47 Church Avenue, Kentville, NS, B4N 2M7
902-678-6002 | info@gaspereau.com