Kate Beaton was born and raised in Cape Breton, where she lives with her family. After graduating from Mount Allison University with a double degree in History and Anthropology, she moved to Alberta in search of work that would allow her to pay down her student loans. Beaton’s experience working in the oil patch informed her bestselling graphic memoir, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, a New York Times Notable Book and one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2022. It also won CBC’s 2023 Canada Reads. During her years out West, Beaton also began creating webcomics under the name Hark! A Vagrant. The collections of that landmark strip, as well as Step Aside, Pops, spent several months on the New York Times graphic novel bestseller list, appeared on best of the year lists from Time, The Washington Post, Vulture, NPR Books, and won the Eisner, Ignatz, Harvey, and Doug Wright Awards. Beaton has also published the picture books King Baby, The Princess and the Pony, and Shark Girl.
A laugh-out-loud picture book from bestselling comics creator Kate Beaton about a brave shark girl bent on revenge after a greedy fishing captain messes with her waters.
When Shark Girl is captured by an evil fishing captain’s net, she makes a vow… for REVENGE!
With the sea witch’s help, Shark Girl becomes a human sailor and launches a plan… for MUTINY!
But Shark Girl needs the help of her crew mates before she can enact her plan. Will Shark girl SINK… or SWIM?
Kate Beaton has created a subversive and hilarious spin on the classic little mermaid fairytale that will inspire little readers. Sometimes standing up for what’s right means you have to show your teeth!
“An exceptionally beautiful book about loneliness, labor, and survival.” –Carmen Maria Machado (In the Dream House)
Before there was Kate Beaton, New York Times bestselling cartoonist of Hark! A Vagrant, there was Katie Beaton of the Cape Breton Beatons, specifically Mabou, a tight-knit seaside community where the lobster is as abundant as beaches, fiddles, and Gaelic folk songs. With the singular goal of paying off her student loans, Katie heads out west to take advantage of Alberta’s oil rush—part of the long tradition of East Coasters who seek gainful employment elsewhere when they can’t find it in the homeland they love so much. Katie encounters the harsh reality of life in the oil sands, where trauma is an everyday occurrence yet is never discussed.
Beaton’s natural cartooning prowess is on full display as she draws colossal machinery and mammoth vehicles set against a sublime Albertan backdrop of wildlife, northern lights, and boreal forest. Her first full length graphic narrative, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is an untold story of Canada: a country that prides itself on its egalitarian ethos and natural beauty while simultaneously exploiting both the riches of its land and the humanity of its people.
Introduction by Kate Beaton
Alistair MacLeod has been hailed internationally as a master of the short story. Now MacLeod’s collected stories, including two never before published, are gathered together for the first time in Island. These 16 superbly crafted stories, most of them firmly based in Cape Breton even if its people stray elsewhere, depict men and women living out their lives against the haunting landscape that surrounds them. Focusing on the complexities and abiding mysteries at the heart of human relationships, MacLeod maps the close bonds and impassable chasms that lie between man and woman, parent and child, and invokes memory and myth to celebrate the continuity of the generations, even in the midst of unremitting change. Eloquent, humane, powerful, and told in a voice at once elegiac and life-affirming, the stories in this astonishing collection seize us from the outset and remain with us long after the final page.
Bodies of Art, Bodies of Labour explores connections between class, literature, and art from Cape Breton Island. Kate Beaton addresses the fact that people from poor or working-class backgrounds face significant barriers entering the Canadian arts scene and shows that if they do not write themselves into stories, others will, often with damaging results. Beaton thoughtfully examines personal and working-class legacies, celebrating the authenticity and power of truly seeing ourselves and each other in the art that we create.
Starring Kate Beaton. Hosted by Gabrielle Drolet
In the spirit of reconciliation, we acknowledge that we live, work and play on the traditional territories of the Blackfoot Confederacy (Siksika, Kainai, Piikani), the Tsuut’ina, the Iyarhe Nakoda Nations, the Otipemisiwak Métis Government of the Métis Nation within Alberta District 6, and all people who make their homes in the Treaty 7 region of Southern Alberta.
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