The novel focuses on the events surrounding the capture of DEMASDUWIT, one of the last Beothuk. It was also shortlisted for many awards, including the GILLER PRIZE, the Commonwealth Prize, and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. River Thieves won the Winterset Award for Excellence in Newfoundland Writing, the Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Prize, and the Atlantic Independent Booksellers' Choice Award. Flesh and Blood revolves around the residents of the small Newfoundland mining town of Black Rock (a thinly veiled Buchans) as they try to establish themselves in an ever-changing world.Ĭrummey's most celebrated work is his novel River Thieves, published in 2001. His collection of short stories Flesh and Blood was released in 1998 (expanded and re-released in 2003), the same year he was nominated for the Journey Prize. His first published short story was a runner up for the Prism International Short Fiction Contest in 1994. Though a respected and successful poet, Crummey has garnered more praise for his prose. Hard Light is representative of the thematic concerns that define much of Crummey's work: the preservation in print of the hard labour, harsh elements, and ironic humour that define the disappearing rural Newfoundland existence.Ĭrummey went on to publish two more collections of poetry, Emergency Roadside Assistance (2001) and Salvage (2002), and though the setting moves from place to place, Crummey's preoccupation with loss - both personal and communal - remains evident especially in the warning he gives readers on the first page of Salvage: 'Poems about Loss/ Next 100 Pages.'

His genre-defying Hard Light was published in 1998 and combines poetry with retellings of stories told to Crummey primarily by his father, Arthur. His first collection of poems, Arguments with Gravity, won the Writer's Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador Literary Award for Poetry in 1996. Crummey travelled and worked in a number of countries before settling down to write and live in St John's, Nfld.Ĭrummey's first taste of success as a professional writer came in 1994 when he won the inaugural BRONWEN WALLACE AWARD for Poetry for work that had appeared in several anthologies. He attended graduate school at QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY, where he earned an MA (1988), and began but later withdrew from the PhD program.

Following a childhood in Buchans, Nfld, and Wabush, Labrador, Michael Crummey graduated from MEMORIAL UNIVERSITY OF NEWFOUNDLAND in 1987 with a BA in English. Michael Crummey, poet, short story writer, novelist (born at Buchans, NL 18 November 1965).

River Thieves by Michael Crummey