An Abbotsford author has been shortlisted for the Page Turner Awards eBook Award for her young adult novel, Blind the Eyes.
Katrina Wiggins, who writes under the pen name K.A. Wiggins, is a creative writing coach.
The Page Turner Awards enable published authors and unpublished writers of fiction and non-fiction across all genres to enter their writing to get discovered by high-profile judges from the literary world.
“It’s such an unexpected honour to have my work recognized by the Page Turner Awards judges,” Wiggins said. “I look forward to reaching new readers and hope this achievement opens up further opportunity for women horror writers and Canadian fantasy stories.”
Blind the Eyes is about the climate crisis arriving with monsters, but the one girl who could have stopped them is dead.
Wiggins set out to write escapist teen fantasy as a change of pace from her career in marketing and business analysis. What came out was the climate apocalypse, folkloric soul-sucking monsters, haunted nightmares, and repressive authoritarian regimes staffed by traumatized workers.
Vancouver and other B.C. locations are featured in Wiggins’ fiction for good reason – her family has over four generations of history in Vancouver, the Fraser Valley, and the Cariboo-Chilcotin regions.
She is inspired by Irish-Canadian author O.R. Melling’s The Book of Dreams and J.R.R. Tolkien’s mission to nurture national identity through folklore.
Wiggins makes a point of choosing local settings for her speculative fiction to help the next generation of readers look beyond colonial visions of UK-centric folklore and find magic at home in Canada and around the world.
Wiggins had an early start in creative writing through a student work placement with Penny Lett of the Chilliwack Progress newspaper, and recognition in local writing contests, including a first place in the Law Society of British Columbia’s 2004 Law Week Short Story Contest.
A second opportunity came from the Fraser Valley Regional Library’s It’s Happening Here teen writing contest in the same year.
Since then, Wiggins has played her part in encouraging the next generation of young writers through literary festivals, panels, and creative writing workshops with such organizations as The ORCHIDS Children’s Literature Fest (Mumbai, 2019) and the Creative Writing for Children Society (Vancouver, 2020).
Success stories from this year’s Page Turner Awards include three writers winning literary representation, six writers winning a writing mentorship, five writers winning a publishing contract and 13 independent authors winning an audiobook production.
Read more about Katrina’s book at pageturnerawards.com and clicking on “awards” and then “finalists.”