Amanda Peters

Amanda Peters is a Mi'kmaw writer from Falmouth, Nova Scotia, whose debut novel The Berry Pickers was the winner of the 2024 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, 2023 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, 2024 Crime Writers of Canada Award of Excellence, and 2024 Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction.

Life Of mixed Mi'kmaw and European heritage, Peters was born and raised in the Annapolis Valley region of Nova Scotia as a member of the Glooscap First Nation.

Writing The Berry Pickers centres on a young Mi'kmaw girl who goes missing in Maine, depicting the event's lifelong effects on both her birth family and the girl herself, who grows up as the child of a white family with no knowledge of her origins. The novel was published in early 2023 by Harper Perennial.

She was nominated for an Indigenous Voices Award in the Unpublished English Prose category in 2019 for her short story "Pejipug (Winter Arrives)", and won in the same category in 2021 for her debut short story collection Waiting for the Long Night Moon. Waiting for the Long Night Moon, was published on August 13, 2024. Stories in this collection are in inspired by Peters' own background and deal with themes of grief and resilience.

Awards

Publications Novels

Short story collections