Lisa Alward's short fiction has appeared in The Journey Prize Stories and Best Canadian Stories. She has won the Fiddlehead Prize and the New Quarterly's Peter Hinchcliffe Fiction Award and has been shortlisted for the Malahat Review's Open Season Award as well as prism international's Jacob Zilber Prize and long-listed for the CBC Short Story Prize. She was born and grew up in Halifax and worked in literary publishing in Toronto before moving with her family to Vancouver and ultimately to Fredericton, where she began writing fiction at fifty. Her debut collection, Cocktail, was published by Biblioasis in September 2023. It received the 2023 Danuta Gleed Literary Award, for the best first collection of short stories in English by a Canadian, as well as the New Brunswick 2024 Mrs. Dunster's Fiction Prize, and was long-listed for the 2024 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction.