Kevin Hardcastle is a fiction writer from Simcoe County, Ontario. He studied writing at the University of Toronto and at Cardiff University. Hardcastle was a finalist for the 24th annual Journey Prize in 2012, and his short stories have been published in journals and anthologies internationally, including The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, The Puritan, The New Quarterly, Joyland, Shenandoah, The Walrus, The Journey Prize Stories 24 & 26, Best Canadian Stories 15, and Internazionale.
Hardcastle’s debut short story collection, Debris, was published by Biblioasis in fall 2015. Debris won the 2016 Trillium Book Award, the 2016 ReLit Award for Short Fiction, was runner-up for the 2016 Danuta Gleed Literary Award, and was a finalist for the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize.
His critically acclaimed novel, In the Cage, was published in 2017, and is available for order now.
In 2018, the novel was published in French translation by Éditions Albin Michel, who also have Debris slated for publication in the near future, under their Terres d’Amérique imprint. In the Cage was published in German translation by Polar Verlag in fall 2019. Film rights have been optioned to Jason Buxton at Festina Lente Productions.
Hardcastle was the fall 2019 Writer-In-Residence at the Toronto Public Library, and is an instructor in short fiction and novel writing at University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies.
Hardcastle is represented by Dean Cooke and The Cooke Agency.
Kevin Hardcastle 
I find Hardcastle to be a sensitive writer. He loves his characters. He has been that character for a moment at some point in his life. Each character. Every character. He writes fiction but no he doesn’t. The story is fictional but the feeling behind it is pure love and complete devotion. Hardcastle’s characters are imperfect. And sometimes they are even persecuted. A sense of utter calamity may surround them. That is not the description of a fictional character that is a description of a real human being. Hardcastle breaks down walls with his writing because he just plainly writes his view of life from his own experience and his gift of describing a picture with words, and sometimes it is shocking but it is talented. You can’t write a character like he does and expect people to really buy him/her if you don’t write them with love, utter honesty, and as imperfect individuals with truth. Hardcastle nails that bit.
This guy is a born writer and he will grind it out and write until the day he dies no matter what happens it is something he has to do. He cannot not do it. The stories are close to home. Sometimes too close.
Hardcastle writes like a good record. It catches you with a lyric or a chord and then your like oh hang on a second. Then you pull over your car and you listen to it come over the radio and the singer sounds like a coal miner and the guitar sounds like coal miner and the lyrics make you think your a coal miner for 4 minutes and 32 seconds…………….and you actually learn something about yourself ……..and if it’s a really good one it will make you cry. Hardcastle is good enough to make you cry when he wants too.
Pingback: In the Cage by Kevin Hardcastle – Consumed by Ink