INSIDE has won the 2006 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize
The $15,000 prize was presented to Harvey at a ceremony in Toronto on March 7th.
The jury citation:
"Quite simply, Inside by Kenneth Harvey is a tour-de-force. Daring, difficult, and utterly uncompromising, the novel is a profound exploration of one man’s halting attempt at redemption.
The language of the book, like the main character it evokes, seems to be wrought in violent poverty, tempered in prison, and determined to break through into grace.
After fourteen years of incarceration, Myrden is finally released when his conviction for murder is overturned; wrongfully accused and imprisoned, he will be a rich man after he receives his legal settlement.
In pitch-perfect prose, without a moment of sentimentality, Kenneth Harvey takes the reader inside Myrden’s world in a rough St. John’s neighbourhood. We meet his friends, his betrayers, his avaricious wife, his alienated daughter and loving granddaughter. And we watch as his attempt to change his life and the lives of those he loves brings the novel to a conclusion as inevitable as it is riveting.
In a world of formulaic fiction, Inside is a point-blank godsend."
-- 2006 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize jury
(Karen Connelly, Jeffrey Moore, and Anna Porter
Anne Collins (Publisher, Random House Canada), Kenneth J. Harvey and Craig Pyette (Harvey's editor)