Leo McKay, Jr.

Who is Leo McKay, Jr.?

Leo McKay, Jr. is a Canadian novelist and short story writer from Stellarton, Nova Scotia. He also is a periodic contributor to the Globe and Mail.

McKay's debut short story collection, Like This, was short-listed for the Giller Prize in 1995 and received the Dartmouth Book Award for fiction in 1996.

His first novel, Twenty-Six, was published in 2003. It became a national bestseller, and won the 2004 Dartmouth Book Award.

McKay currently teaches English at Cobequid Educational Centre in Truro, Nova Scotia.

His latest novel, titled Roll Up The Rim, was self-published in the spring of 2013, and crowd-funded on Indiegogo McKay was born and raised in the town of Stellarton, Nova Scotia, where he graduated from Stellarton High School in 1982. He grew up in the small working class Stellarton neighborhood called the Red Row, a neighborhood made up of hundred-year-old former mining company duplexes and the tight-knit community of working-class people who live in them. Both of his parents grew up in the same neighborhood. His mother, Georgina Bellick, was the daughter of Eastern European immigrants.