Lisa Alward's Cocktail won the 2023 Danuta Gleed Award, for the best first collection of short stories by a Canadian in English, as well as the New Brunswick 2024 Mrs. Dunster's Fiction Prize, and was long-listed for the 2024 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. She grew up in Halifax and worked in literary publishing in Toronto before moving with her family to Vancouver and ultimately to Fredericton, where at 50 she began writing stories.