Michael Crummey (born November 18, 1965) is a Canadian poet and a writer of historical fiction. His writing often draws on the history and landscape of Newfoundland and Labrador.
Early life and education
Crummey was born in Buchans, Newfoundland; he grew up there and in Wabush, Labrador, where he moved with his family in the late 1970s.[1] He began to write poetry while studying at Memorial University in St. John's, where he won the university's Gregory J. Power Poetry Contest in 1986 and received a B.A. in English in 1987. He completed a M.A. at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, in 1988, later leaving the Ph.D. program to pursue his writing career.[2]
Also in 1998, Crummey published a collection of short stories, Flesh and Blood, all of which take place in the fictional mining community of Black Rock, which strongly resembles Buchans. That year Crummey was nominated for the Journey Prize.
Crummey returned to St. John's in 2001. In that year he published his debut novel, River Thieves, which details the contact and conflict between European settlers and the last of the Beothuk in the early 19th century, including the capture of Demasduit. The book became a Canadian bestseller, and won 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 was long-listed for the International Dublin Literary Award.
Crummy's second novel, The Wreckage was published in 2005; the story of young Newfoundland soldier Wish Fury and his beloved Sadie Parsons during and after World War II, it was longlisted for the 2007 IMPAC Award. His third novel Galore, was published in 2009, won a Commonwealth Writers Prize,[3] and was shortlisted for the 2011 IMPAC Award.
Crummey continued to write prose and poetry with themes related to Newfoundland and Labrador. The poems and prose in Hard Light are inspired by the stories of his father and other relatives.
Newfoundland: Journey Into a Lost Nation (with photographer Greg Locke) (2004)
Most of What Follows is True: Places Imagined and Real (University of Alberta Press, 2019)
Anthologies
The Breakwater Book of Contemporary Newfoundland Poetry (Breakwater, 2013)
The Harbrace Anthology of Poetry, 5th Edition (Nelson, 2012)
The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories, selected and introduced by Jane Urquhart (Penguin Books, 2007)
The New Canon: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry (Signal Editions, 2006)
Canadian Short Stories (Penguin Books, 2004)
Victory Meat (Doubleday Canada, 2003)
Coastlines: The Poetry of Atlantic Canada, ed. Anne Compton, Laurence Hutchman, Ross Leckie and Robin McGrath (Goose Lane Editions, 2002)
Further reading
Jennifer Bowering Delisle: The present of the past, in Ten Canadian Writers in Context. Dir. Curtis Gillespie, Marie J. Carrière, Jason Purcell. University of Alberta Press, Edmonton 2016, pp 37 – 56 (incl. excerpt from Sweetland, pp 46 – 56). Also in Google books
