The Kiosk Story wins the CBC radio
Northern Ontario Reads competition 

April 3, 2008-The winner of the CBC radio’s Northern Ontario Reads competition was announced this week. The winner was The Kiosk Story. The Northern Ontario Reads competition was presented by the Northeastern Ontario CBC out of Sudbury and was decided by listeners who voted by email or phone during March on which of four books entered by knowledgeable panelists is “that one piece of literature with a Northern Ontario connection that all of us should read?" The other books being considered were: The Other Side of the Bridge by Mary Lawson, Forty Words for Sorrow by Gilles Blunt, and a collection of short stories called Outcrops.  

The Kiosk Story was entered by panelist Suzanne Brooks owner of Gulliver’s Books in North Bay. She said that when the book became a “runaway best seller” just before Christmas she decided to take another look to see why it had such wide appeal. She discovered that it told the “quintessential northern story” of a resource based industry town as well as the history of the First Nations people, the railway and other areas of interest. 

She said that another reason why it is so popular is that it is the story of the people of the community. Individual family stories enhance the facts of the story such as the First Nation Amabe du Fond family who have a river named after them, the Bergerons a typical lumbering family and the Cappadocias a CNR family. She said that although the author has told the individual stories he has written a “story which transcends that particular town and those particular people and speaks to what life in northern Ontario is about.” 

Commenting on the win, panelist Marian Botsford Fraser, last years winner, said that she was “kind of torn because the book about Kiosk is actually a book that I have on my bookshelf in Toronto and in fact … I went to Kiosk and I spent a week there and it is an extraordinary place. First of all it’s an extremely beautiful place and you could feel that there was a real story there, a very important story about Northern Ontario so I’m glad that Kiosk won.”