Kevin Hardcastle is the award-winning author of the forthcoming and highly anticipated new novel, County Road Six, which will be published on May 19, 2026 by Bond Street Books/Doubleday Canada.
Hardcastle’s short story collection, Debris, won the Trillium Book Award and the ReLit Award for Short Fiction, and was a finalist for the Danuta Gleed Award and the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize. His critically acclaimed debut novel, In the Cage, has been published in France and Germany as Dans la Cage. Debris was also published in France, as Toutes les chances qu’on se donne. Hardcastle’s work has appeared widely in literary journals and anthologies, and he was a finalist for the 24th annual Journey Prize. His short story, Old Man Marchuk, was included in the 26th annual Journey Prize Stories and recently re-published in Journey, a compendium of the best short fiction collected throughout the 35 years of the anthology. He grew up in North Simcoe County, Ontario.
Hardcastle is represented by Ron Eckel and Cooke McDermid, and by Sanjana Seelam and Anna DeRoy at WME for film & TV rights.
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.
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