Leo McKay Jr.'s best known book is the novel Twenty-six, which Canada Reads named one of the forty most important Canadian books of the first decade of the century. It won the Dartmouth Book Award and was chosen for the One Book Nova Scotia event. His debut collection of stories, Like This, also won the Dartmouth Book Award, and was a finalist for the Giller Prize. He lives in Mi'kma'ki, the unceded, ancestral home of the Mi'kmaw people, where he has been a high school teacher for almost thirty years.