Amanda
Peters
Amanda Peters is a writer of Mi’kmaq and settler ancestry. In 2021, she was selected as a Writers’ Trust Rising Star by Katherena Vermette and won the Indigenous Voices Award for Unpublished Prose. Her work has appeared in publications including The Antigonish Review, Grain, and the Alaska Quarterly Review. She holds an MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and a certificate in creative writing from the University of Toronto. The Berry Pickers is her first book. Peters lives in Falmouth, Nova Scotia.
Award History
Jury Citation
“Written in crystalline clear prose and brilliantly descriptive of a time and place, The Berry Pickers tells a moving story especially relevant to our times, when so much of Canada’s dark past increasingly comes to light. Set among a community of migrant Indigenous families who travel each summer from Nova Scotia to Maine to pick berries for white farmers, it recounts a kidnapping and the family’s long grief and wait. The movement and the suspense of the novel is quietly sustained. The telling itself is compassionate, and the reader is left to mull on the events, the lives, and the society depicted.” — 2023 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize Jury (francesca ekwuyasi, Alix Hawley, MG Vassanji)
Program History
Citation
Amanda Peters is a shining light. Her fiction embraces generations and through it, every one of her characters comes alive in every way. They each have a unique voice and being, but somehow all feel connected, to each other, to me, to all readers. I am so excited to read more of the stories she has to share from Mi’kma’ki.
