• Age: 15
• Grade: 10

In Sarah Robert’s debut collection Wax Boats, a rural island community comes to life in action-packed, evocative tales. Cougar ladies fight the BC wilderness and the inevitable extinction of their peaceful island lives. An expectant mother turns to Native traditions to guide her through a safe delivery. A Boy Scout troupe rescues their own leader, and learns to welcome someone “from away.” Wax Boats introduces thought-provoking characters caught between the encroaching modern, industrial world and the hard truths of lives lived at the edge of everything.

Sarah Roberts is an award-winning writer and a graduate of the University of Victoria's creative writing program. She has worked as a writer for the Ministry of Forests, Aboriginal Affairs, freelanced for newspapers and magazines and has published as a ghost writer. Her short stories have been published by literary journals in Canada, New Zealand, England and the United States. Roberts lives in Gibsons, BC, with her husband Eli, a bird and two tiny dogs. Wax Boats is her first book.

Sarah Roberts' profile page

• Winner, Danuta Gleed

Roberts’ dozen stories in Wax Boats are vibrant with the “genius of place,” to borrow a term from Ethel Wilson, as well as memorable characterization. Somewhat reminiscent of Kinsella’s "rez’" characters or Anne Cameron’s mélange of wacky west coast families, the stories reveal a complicated world of boats, beach camping, wild bush women and men, ancient lore, longhouses, cougars and beer.

BC Bookworld

Wax Boats

This collection of short stories takes place on a fictional island near Vancouver. Each is told in a unique voice, representing the many communities that make up the island “folk”. There is Old Man Bridgewater, a company boss and exploiter of the island’s natural resource, and there are First Nations people whose traditions inexplicably trump modern methods. The lives of blue collar workers, fishermen, eccentric old-timers, kids who grew up on the island, stayed or “got away”, create a tapestry of modern island life. Roberts points out the difference between “newbies” city folk, and the locals. “City people don’t believe in things like well water, oil lamps, or only having one road. How do you explain survival tools…island magic? I don’t even try.”

Wax Boats won the Danuta Gleed Award for Short Fiction.

Caution: References to drugs, alcohol, sex, and some swearing are included.