The 2023 Incite season premieres with a powerful duo of debut novelists already making review headlines. Journey Prize-winner Jessica Johns’ Bad Cree has made waves among critics and contemporaries alike, with Eden Robinson calling the work and its characters “wry, moody, and subversive” and Cherie Dimaline noting that once the story starts, “there’s no backing out, no pause, no stall.” Some Hellish, by Nicholas Herring, is the winner of the 2022 Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, noted for Herring’s “passion for the language of work, […] droll and philosophical, ribald and poetic.” Both join esteemed Festival friend and Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize-finalist Carleigh Baker for an evening of literary magic with two acclaimed, propulsive debuts.