Sandra Nicholls writes poetry, short stories, and novels. Her first novel, And the Seas Shall Turn to Lemonade, was short listed for the K.M.Hunter Artists Award and was published in the fall of 2011. Her second book of poetry, Woman of Sticks, Woman of Stones, won the Archibald Lampman Award, and was a finalist for the Pat Lowther Award. A poem from her first collection, The Untidy Bride, took third prize in the international Stephen Leacock competition. With the help of a Canada Council grant, she is working on her second novel, The Hermit, a work of literary fiction that explores themes of loss, loneliness and connection when a woman hires a "hermit" to live in her dead husband's shed. The first 5000 words of this novel won her the Bath International Novel Contest Cornerstones Prize in 2024, selected from more than 2,500 entries from around the world. She is currently working on two other novels as well: The Third Road, set in Malaya during the Communist uprising of 1948, and Season of Crows, which explores a woman's descent into paranoia as she struggles with the effects of intergenerational trauma . Sandra lives in Ottawa, with her husband, guitarist and composer, Roddy Ellias. In the summer of 2018, they wrote an opera together, Sleeping Rough, which was performed at the Music and Beyond Festival. Their most recent project is an album of songs about the experience of the pandemic. Not This Room is available on Bandcamp. You can visit her website at www.sandranicholls.com, or her Instagram account, sandranicholls719.