In House with Breakwater Books: A Storied History and a New Home

In July, Breakwater Books opened its doors to a new office and retail space on Duckworth Street in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador. Re-locating to the Downtown core is not just a fresh start for Breakwater, but a return to its roots. For most of Breakwater’s 50+ year history, we’ve existed Downtown—in the colourful and vibrant centre that houses much of the cultural and artistic history of St. John’s. Breakwater’s new location is just a stone’s throw from our original address at 277 Duckworth Street. In many ways, in our new space, we’ve returned home.

My name is Rebecca Roberts (not to be confused with our president and publisher, Rebecca Rose!) and I am the marketing coordinator at Breakwater Books. I joined the team here in 2024, and I’ve quickly become even more enamoured than I already was with the literary scene in this province. I’m very lucky to work in this industry in a place that is so rich with creative talent, at a publishing house with such a reputable and longstanding history.

Breakwater Books was founded in 1973 by Clyde Rose, Tom Dawe, Al Pittman, Pat Byrne, and Richard Buehler—all professors at Newfoundland’s university who were frustrated by the emphasis on American and British literature in their curriculum and the distinct lack of representation of literature from Newfoundland and Labrador. This desire to elevate NL and Atlantic Canadian literature was the impetus for founding Breakwater Books and the mission that made Breakwater a driving force in the cultural renaissance that dawned in Newfoundland and Labrador in the late twentieth century. For over 50 years, we’ve worked to publish and promote the work of Newfoundlanders and Labradorians, a population who severely lacked representation in Canadian publishing at the time. Clyde’s daughter Rebecca Rose joined the management team in 2002 and established a succession plan resulting in her purchase of the family press in 2009. As president and publisher, Rebecca has continued to expand Breakwater’s mission to champion Newfoundland and Labrador writers while expanding to feature emerging and established authors from across Canada and overseas.

Breakwater Books publishes award-winning writing in all literary genres—fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama, art, young adult and children’s books, as well as cookbooks, guidebooks, and educational resources. In the past year alone, our books and authors have been nominated for over 40 awards. We’re proud to have helped establish the literary careers of eminent writers such as Bernice Morgan (author of the celebrated classic Random Passage) and Kevin Major (Governor General award winner and author of twenty-five books, including the award-winning Sebastian Synard Mystery series, beginning with One for the Rock). In more recent years, we’ve helped launch the careers of up-and-coming writers, including Bridget Canning (whose novel Some People’s Children won the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award in 2021 and the BMO Winterset Award in 2020), Maggie Burton (whose poetry collection Chores was the winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize Canadian First Book Award in 2024), Allison Graves (who was recently chosen by Dublin Literary Award Winner Michael Crummey for the Writers’ Trust Rising Star program), and Susie Taylor (whose short story collection Vigil won the 2025 BMO Winterset Award and the 2025 Alistair Macleod Award for Short Fiction). We’ve published award-winning children’s authors and illustrators, including Cara Kansala (author of the award-winning and bestselling The Ewe Who Knew Who Knit You), Saqamaw Mi’sel Joe and Sheila O’Neill (co-authors of the bestselling My Indian and Suliewey), and Adam and Jennifer Young (authors of The Little Red Shed).

Since the early 1980s, Breakwater’s backlist shows a continued commitment to work by Indigenous writers. We’ve also made long-standing contributions to feminist literature and we have a particular interest in promoting the work of 2SLGBTQ+ writers. We’re committed to continue representing equity-seeking communities and being vocal proponents for social justice and are actively seeking additional new work from BIPOC writers, writers with disabilities, and other authors from marginalized communities.

If you’ve never had the pleasure to visit Newfoundland and Labrador, and St. John’s in particular, you won’t quite appreciate the depth of our unique culture. It isn’t all fish and chips and jellybean row, or screech-ins and kitchen parties. We have those things in spades, of course, but the real depth of our culture is in our artists and the indescribable community of creative folks who live and work in our little city, harnessing a history of hardship and togetherness and turning it into art—into music, literature, paintings, and theatre. In Downtown St. John’s, no artist exists in a bubble, and they feed off each other’s creativity. We’ve never quite been able to separate the different threads of art in our province. Perhaps that’s why when Breakwater published its first anthology featuring an assortment of NL writers, it was such a success that they went on tour across the island—with their band called the Breakwater Boys.

From the original location at 277 Duckworth Street, Breakwater Books moved to 100 Water Street, dubbed the oldest street in North America. After a fire in 2010, Breakwater left the Downtown core and operated in a new location at 1 Stamp’s Lane, where the business lived until 2025. Through these years, Breakwater has only grown. In 2008, Jesperson Press was amalgamated into Breakwater, and in 2017 Breakwater acquired the St. John’s-based Creative Book Publishing, uniting the two strongest literary stables in the province and increasing our backlist to over six hundred active titles. Today, it is safe to say that list is over one thousand—many of which would not exist without the initial drive to publish and elevate books from our province of Newfoundland and Labrador.

When we began looking for our new office and retail home, moving back Downtown to our roots wasn’t the only option, but it became the best one. On paper, it makes perfect sense: the majority of Breakwater’s history has been an established presence in Downtown St. John’s. Beyond returning to our roots, it has let us begin to fill a gap in our artist community. To our knowledge, St. John’s is the only capital city in Canada without a true, traditional independent bookstore. At our new home, we’re working on changing that. Along with our new offices, we’ve opened a retail space housing our entire collection plus the expansive collections of some of our local publisher friends as well. At the moment, we’re excited to feature titles from Boulder Books, Memorial University Press, and Running the Goat, Books & Broadsides. And we’re looking to grow! We’re working on adding a French collection to our selection, and featuring more books from independent publishers in Newfoundland and beyond.

The summer of 2025 was one of the busiest in recent memory for St. John’s—the city hosted numerous music festivals and cultural events, and was home to the 2025 Canada Summer Games. Tourists have flocked to our province and our city and we’ve been delighted to welcome them into our new space. We’re preparing for a grand opening in the fall, and excited to open this new chapter in Breakwater’s storied history with more events in our new space, more readers through our doors, and more local authors on our shelves.

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Thanks to Rebecca Roberts for sharing the celebrated history behind Newfoundland’s Breakwater Books.