Winning Prizes

Winning Prizes is a collection of essays dealing with topics ranging from faith, murder, love of place as well as historical and literary individuals. He writes passionately about individuality and the courage it takes to strike out on one's own and to stand one's ground against the odds, a critical part of living that sooner or later all of us must deal with in our own way.

Here are some frank, insightful and challenging narratives about poverty, physical labour, travel, Christianity, stereotyping, pilgrimage, assisted suicide and the morality police. Along the way, Richards reflects upon his lengthy literary career, with its ups and downs and ultimate success. The story will be quite surprising for many but also deeply revealing about the nature of publishing in Canada. His reminiscences of life in rural New Brunswick provide deep background on the source material for his many novels and reveal much about the writer, his loves and losses and the inner strengths that sustain one of Canada's most important novelists.