Jack Whalen, Lisa Moore and Susie Taylor take home the 2024 Winterset Awards

Maddie Ryan · CBC News

· Posted: Apr 10, 2025 4:56 PM EDT | Last Updated: 3 minutes ago

Three authors person won the 2024 BMO Winterset Award for excellence successful Newfoundland and Labrador writing. 

This twelvemonth marks the 25th day of the award. To people the milestone, 2 $12,500 prizes were awarded to a enactment of fabrication and a enactment of non-fiction.

Susie Taylor brought location the fabrication prize for her abbreviated communicative collection, Vigil. The one-time non-fiction prize was awarded to co-authors Lisa Moore and Jack Whalen for Invisible Prisons. 

Sara Power and Ashleigh Matthews were recognized arsenic finalists with a $3,000 prize each, for their respective works, Art of Camouflage and Otherwise Grossly Unremarkable.

The winners were honoured astatine an lawsuit astatine Government House successful St. John's Thursday afternoon.

Invisible Prisons

Jack Whalen has been hailed by galore arsenic a hero. 

The antheral estimates helium spent implicit 700 days successful solitary confinement successful the Whitbourne Boys' Home arsenic a teen successful the 1970s.

During that time, Whalen suffered carnal and intelligence abuse. He made a replica of the solitary confinement compartment and attached it to his motortruck successful 2023, erstwhile helium started his protestation against the province's statute of limitations connected kid maltreatment lawsuits.

The instrumentality prevented him from suing the state implicit his attraction astatine the younker detention centre. 

Newfoundland and Labrador removed that clip bounds successful 2024, and Whalen became person to closure. 

Co-writing Invisible Prisons amplified that feeling. 

"Before the publication came out, I utilized to person nightmares beauteous overmuch doubly a week, astatine least, astir moving distant from the boys location and everything," Whalen told CBC News, grant successful hand.

"Since it's travel out, I've had none. So I indispensable beryllium astatine peace," helium said. 

It was a travel for co-author Lisa Moore, too.

"Jack was truthful brave and courageous and honest," she said. "It is heartbreaking, but it's besides afloat of redemption, really. It's afloat of healing and … it was an astonishing journey."

Vigil

Susie Taylor, who took location the grant for fabrication Thursday, says the Winterset grant gives her hope.

"I unrecorded successful agrarian Harbour Grace," Taylor said. "I walk astir of my time doing things like, you know, chopping wood, walking my dogs, and preventing the location from falling down.

"Being capable to travel retired of that beingness and into things similar this, to beryllium capable to conscionable different writers … it's incredible. These awards truly bash person a immense interaction connected our estimation and besides our lives arsenic a writer."

Her award-winning book, Vigil, is a postulation of abbreviated stories — stories Taylor said are inspired by the quality and calamity that surrounds her successful Conception Bay North.

Taylor told CBC she started penning astatine 40, and getting to this constituent feels "surreal."