Sharon Bala

SHARON BALA 's #1 bestselling debut novel, The Boat People, won the 2019 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction and has been translated into four languages. It was also longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award and the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and shortlisted for CBC's Canada Reads, the Amazon First Novel Award, the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award, and the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award. Her short story "Butter Tea at Starbucks" won the prestigious Writers' Trust McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize in 2017, and she had a second story longlisted and included in the Journey Prize anthology. Sharon lives in St. John's, Newfoundland, where she is a member of the Port Authority writing group.