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Adam Hill reviews Planet Earth in Literary Review of Canada
April 2026 Full review Ruddock is at his best when fusing attention to everyday details with a geological sensibility ... “Genetic Memory” is the real highlight. It begins with an itinerant couple moving from Ontario to Yukon, where they naively set up camp next to Clinton Creek’s asbestos mine. “Rogue fibres hitched rides on inspired air,” the narrator says, imagining the poisonous particles “tricking the genome.” He muses on inherited knowledge and how it is heeded or neglected. In seven pages, Ruddock experiments with unlikely associations between the natural and the artificial, the physiological and the psychological, the local and the global. “Floorboards creaking, slow-dancing” in a Toronto apartment expands outward to “our species’ dire concerns, the moratorium on cod, draggers, clear-cuts, sewage, whatever else we have done to North America.” In this way, “Genetic Memory” is Planet Earth in miniature. Throughout, Ruddock succeeds in scaling his narrative frames seamlessly, locating the fragile individual amid ongoing planetary collapse. Jamie Portman reviews Planet Earth in the Windsor Star
Jan 24, 2026 Full review There are further surprises from this now-retired Canadian physician who has a shape-shifting capacity when he writes. There's a brief evocation of 1953's terrible polio assault—language of stark, documentary impressionism. There's the impishly entitled "The Oxford Book Of Modern Verse," Ruddock's own spin on the woman who rescued poet Butler Yeats from impotency in a Donegal hotel buffeted by winds so fierce that even local sheep were driven indoors. Be prepared as well for the capricious pleasures of "Sweet Boy," an entry into the peculiar world of Prince that allows Ruddock to demonstrate his gift for unleashing a single sentence that can go on for pages. Alison Manley reviews Planet Earth in the Miramichi Reader
Nov 22, 2025 Full Review Planet Earth is a wide-ranging collection of stories. Clocking in at 184 pages in total, this is small but mighty: there are pieces of flash fiction here, longer stories, ones that break your heart and ones that chill you to the bone. Ruddock is a master of the lengthy sentence, pulling you along what might otherwise feel convoluted but somehow comes to a meaningful conclusion. “First Girlfriend”—the second story in the collection and just two pages—had me convinced this collection was going to put me through a wringer. There’s complicated joy in these stories, but also complicated sadness. 
April 24, 2023
CBC LISTEN: On the Go with Anthony Germain "Short Story, Long Sentence" with Nicholas Ruddock Listen here 
Five finalists have been chosen from more than 2300 entries from across the country
The Grand Prize winner, announced April 18, will receive a $6000 cash prize from the Canada Council for the Arts and a two-week writing residency at Artscape Gibraltar Point CBC Books, CBC’s online home for literary content, together with its partner the Canada Council for the Arts, have announced the finalists for the 2023 CBC Short Story Prize. The finalists are:
In Review
Last Hummingbird West of Chile "It is Ruddock’s gifted command of language, wit and wild imagination that suspends all disbelief and takes readers on a fantastic voyage, often through dark scenes and controversial themes." –Guelph Today Full Interview 
"A stunning work of imaginative fiction, Last Hummingbird West of Chile spins a tale of adventure that is in turn comedic, violent, poignant and thoughtful."
–Atlantic Books Full Review Launch
Last Hummingbird West of Chile Nicholas Ruddock's new novel is released with Breakwater Books 
March 2020
The Moth Poetry Prize shortlist, chosen by the American poet Claudia Rankine, is announced today. The skilful use of language in Nicholas Ruddock’s Genetic Memory, Rankine says, "allows us to simultaneously exist in the past, present, and future."
The story "Ventimiglia" is shortlisted for the Circus Berlin Short Story Award 2020. Read an excerpt here.
"Esther" wins the 2017 Bridport Prize for fiction. The judge, Peter Hobbs, writes: "Technically so accomplished, but playful too in its form and its long sentences. It plays with plot more than most stories, but the work of plotting is done so slyly it is almost invisible. There are many details, but none are extraneous. It has real humanity to it, and a tremendous cumulative power, conjuring the lives of its protagonists in a handful of pages, allowing us to live beside them for years, and ensuring that the final emotional pay-off is utterly devastating." 
"The Phosphorescence," a short story, is in Brick #98 
Shortlisted for the EFG Short Story Award for "The Phosphorescence"
Night Ambulance, a novel, is released by Breakwater Books, 2016 Night Ambulance from translucence on Vimeo. |
Recent Short Fiction
"Polio" Fuel Anthology UK 2023 "Sweet Boy" Nona Heaslip Award Exile Magazine Manchester Met Shortlist May 2022 "The Luxembourg Gardens" TSS publishing UK Feb 2021 "First Car" NF Quarterly Summer 2020 "Ventimiglia" Circus Anthology KLAK Verlag 2020 "Fortune Bay, 1972" and "The Emergency Department" Newfoundland Quarterly 2019 "Esther" Bridport Prize Anthology Winner of the 2017 Bridport Prize for Short Fiction "The Phosphorescence" Brick Magazine 98 Winter 2017 Shortlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award 2016 "Knight Errant" Brick Magazine 97 May 2016 Toronto "Three Microfictions" Irish Pages 2015 Belfast, Ireland "Mario Vargas Llosa" Exile Quarterly 2015 Toronto "Transformation" Fish 2015, second place Ireland "Snow" CBC Creative Nonfiction Longlist 2015 "George Mallory" Bridport Anthology 2014, second place UK "Polio" Bridport Anthology 2013, first place UK |