Joseph Howse writes fiction and poetry, as well as technical books on computer programming and image analysis. He lives in a Nova Scotian fishing village, where he chats with his cats and nurtures an orchard of hardy fruit trees. His debut novel, The Girl in the Water, has won the 2023 Independent Press Award for Literary Fiction and 2023 IAN Awards for Outstanding Multicultural Fiction. The sequel, The Circus and the Atom, has won the 2026 Independent Press Award for Literary Fiction and for World Literature.