The Canadian writer Lisa Moore originally intended to become a visual artist. The setting for most of her work, novels and short stories is Newfoundland, where she was born and still lives.   

Moore is the author of four novels and several books of short stories, as well as five works for the stage, and she teaches creative writing at Memorial University, Newfoundland. February centres on the real-life tragedy that befell the Ocean Ranger oil rig in 1982, when its entire crew drowned in a storm. Moore’s own father had died a couple of years before so, she says, ‘I felt how grief works its way through a family… how deeply it cuts, how it shapes the lives of those left behind’. She wanted the book ‘to be a kind of elegy to the men who died out there’. 

 

 

Lisa Moore

All nominated books

February