Crummey was born in Buchans, Newfoundland; he grew up there and in Wabush, Labrador, where he moved with his family in the late 1970s. He began to write poetry while studying at Memorial University in St. John's, where he won the university's Gregory J. Power Poetry Contest in 1986 and received a B.A. in English in 1987. He completed a M.A. at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, in 1988, later leaving the Ph.D. program to pursue his writing career.
Career
In 1994, he became the first winner of the Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award for young unpublished writers, and his first volume of poetry, Arguments with Gravity, won the Writer's Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador Book Award for Poetry. Hard Light, his second collection, was nominated for the Milton Acorn People's Poetry Award in 1999. Also in 1998 Crummey published a collection of short stories, Flesh and Blood, all of which take place in the fictional mining community of Black Rock, which strongly resembles Buchans. That year Crummey was nominated for the Journey Prize. Crummey returned to St. John's in 2001, and that year published his debut novel, River Thieves, which details the contact and conflict between European settlers and the last of the Beothuk in the early 19th century, including the capture of Demasduwit. The book became a Canadian bestseller, and won the Thomas Head Raddall Award, the Winterset Award for Excellence in Newfoundland Writing, and the Atlantic Independent Booksellers' Choice Award. It was also shortlisted for the Giller Prize, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the Books in Canada First Novel Award, and was long-listed for the International Dublin Literary Award. Crummy's second novel, The Wreckage was published in 2005; the story of young Newfoundland soldier Wish Fury and his beloved Sadie Parsons during and after World War II, it was longlisted for the 2007 IMPAC Award. His third novel Galore, was published in 2009, won a Commonwealth Writers Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2011 IMPAC Award. Crummey continued to write prose and poetry with themes related to Newfoundland and Laborador. The poems and prose in Hard Light are inspired by the stories of his father and other relatives. Crummey also researched and wrote the 2014 National Film Board of Canada multimedia short film 54 Hours on the 1914 Newfoundland Sealing Disaster, co-directed by Paton Francis and Bruce Alcock. His 2014 novel, Sweetland, was nominated for a Governor General's Award. In 2018, his play Her Mark, set in Newfoundland, was staged in Strathcona. His 2019 novel The Innocents was shortlisted for the 2019 Giller Prize, and for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize.
