Joel Thomas Hynes (David Leyes)

Joel Thomas Hynes’s novel We’ll All Be Burnt in Our Beds Some Night and Sheilah Lukins’s children’s novel Full Speed Ahead: Errol’s Bell Island Adventure were named winners of the 22nd Newfoundland and Labrador Book Awards in a ceremony at St. John’s Government House today. Both authors will receive $1,500.

The three judges of the fiction category called Hynes’s novel, about a grizzled drifter hitchhiking across Canada, “The Odyssey of modern Newfoundland fiction by way of Huckleberry Finn.” The three judges of the children’s/young adult novel category praised Lukins’s sense of humour as well as the character of Errol Bell, a mouse who stows away aboard a ferry.

The NL Book Awards cover a two calendar-year period and alternate between the fiction and children’s/young adult and non-fiction and poetry categories. Eligible writers must have been residents of Newfoundland and Labrador for the 12 months prior to publication or for 36 of the past 60 months.