2008 Arthur Ellis Awards
Liam Durcan's García's Heart has been named the winner of the Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Novel. Congratulations to the author.
2008 Premier’s Awards for Excellence in the Arts
Congratulations to Afua Cooper. The author of The Hanging of Angélique has been named a finalist for the 2008 Premier’s Award, in the category of Artist Award. These awards recognize outstanding achievement by Ontario artists and arts organizations.
2008 Arthur Ellis Awards
Congratulations to both Claire Cameron and Liam Durcan. The Line Painter and García’s Heart have been nominated for the 2008 Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Novel. The awards honouring Canada’s best crime books will be presented by the Crime Writers of Canada on June 5th in Toronto.
2008 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize
The Book of Negroes, Lawrence Hill’s bestselling novel, has been shortlisted for the 2008 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. The winner of the $15,000 award will be announced on April 1st in Toronto.
2008 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize
Congratulations to Lawrence Hill. The Book of Negroes (US title: Someone Knows My Name) has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Lawrence is in the running for Best Book in Canada and the Caribbean. The regional winners will be announced on March 13, 2008, and the overall winner will be announced in South Africa in May.
Amazon.ca's Editors' Picks for the Best Books of 2007 include Lawrence Hill's The Book of Negroes and Alissa York's Effigy. Congratulations to both authors!
Congratulations to Karolyn Smardz Frost! I’ve Got a Home in Glory Land wins the $25,000 award for best English-language non-fiction in Canada. Published in Canada by Thomas Allen, and in the US by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, the book has received rave reviews on both sides of the border. According to the judges’ citation, “Karolyn Smardz Frost weaves prodigious archaeological and historical research into a rich, historically revealing tapestry of the era of the Underground Railroad. The saga of Thornton Blackburn and his wife, from slavery in Kentucky to freedom in Ontario, is social history at its finest."
Anita Rau Badami's Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? and Pearl Luke's Madame Zee have been longlisted for the €100,000 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. A shortlist will be announced on April 2, and the winner will be revealed on June 12.
Anosh Irani's The Song of Kahunsha has been nominated for the American Library Association "Best Books for Young Adults" Award.
Congratulations to Anosh Irani and Karolyn Smardz Frost, who are both nominated for Governor General’s Literary Awards. Anosh is listed in the drama category for his collection of plays, The Bombay Plays: The Matka King and Bombay Black. Karolyn is listed in the non-fiction category for I’ve Got a Home in Glory Land. The winners will be announced on November 27th.
Congratulations to Alissa York, whose novel Effigy has been named to the shortlist for the 2007 Scotiabank Giller Prize. Alissa is one of five authors in the running for the largest prize purse in Canadian fiction. The winner will be announced at a gala event in Toronto on November 6th.
Lawrence Hill’s Book of Negroes (US title: Someone Knows My Name) and Alissa York’s Effigy have both been named to the longlist for the 2007 Giller Prize. The Giller is Canada’s most prestigious award for fiction.
To celebrate the tenth anniversary of company book buyer Pennie Clark Ianniciello, Costco is featuring 10 of her favourite titles from the past decade. Congratulations to Austin Clarke, whose novel The Polished Hoe has been chosen as one of “Pennie’s Picks” for this special event.
On July 5, at a gala ceremony in London, Alan Bradley was awarded the Debut Dagger award by the UK Crime Writers’ Association for The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie. This £500 prize is awarded to an unpublished work based on the first chapter and synopsis. The winner is selected by a panel of agents and publishers.
Sandra Birdsell's Children of the Day and George Elliott Clarke's George & Rue were both longlisted for the 2007 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. The International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award is the largest and most international prize of its kind. It involves libraries from all corners of the globe, and is open to books written in any language.
On March 28, The Girls was declared the Bronze winner of the Richard & Judy Best Read of the Year Award at a gala event at London's Grosvenor House Hotel. And The Girls is on the longlist for the prestigious Orange Broadband Prize, the winner of which will be announced on June 6, 2007.
Ryan Knighton's Cockeyed has been nominated for the 2007 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour. This year is the 60th anniversary of the Leacock, and the winner will be announced at a luncheon at the Stephen Leacock Museum, Orillia on Wednesday April 18.
Madame Zee by Pearl Luke is Chatelaine magazine's Book Club Pick for September 2006.
ANOSH IRANI'S PLAY BOMBAY BLACK WINNER OF FOUR DORA AWARDS
Congratulations to playwright and novelist Anosh Irani, whose play Bombay Black won the award for Outstanding New Play at the 2006 Dora Awards. Bombay Black also won for Outstanding Set Design (Camellia Koo), Outstanding Costume Design (Camellia Koo), and Outstanding Sound Design/Composition (Suba Sankaran).
Bombay Black, set in a seaside apartment in Bombay, is a sultry, spooky and surreal tale of thwarted love and bittersweet revenge.
On April 28th at the Atlantic Book Awards in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, George Elliott Clarke won the Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction for George & Rue (HarperCollins Canada, Carrol and Graf in the USA, Harvill in the UK).
Lawrence Hill is a gold-medal winner at this year's National Magazine Award for his essay "Is Africa's Pain Black America's Burden?" which appeared in The Walrus in February, 2005. Congratulations, Larry!
THE TIME IN BETWEEN WINS MCNALLY ROBINSON BOOK OF THE YEAR AND MARGARET LAURENCE AWARD FOR FICTION
David Bergen's Giller Prize-winning novel The Time In Between (McClelland & Stewart in Canada, Random House in the USA), was the big winner on April 29 at Brave New Words: Manitoba Writing and Publishing Awards Gala in Winnipeg. The Time In Between earned the $5,000 McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award and the $3,500 Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction.
Bergen competes with Lori Lansens, author of The Girls (Knopf Canada, Little, Brown US), for Fiction Book of the Year at the upcoming Libris Awards at Book Expo Canada in Toronto, where Bergen is also up for Author of the Year, on June 11.
BERGEN WINS GILLER PRIZE!
Winnipeg writer David Bergen accepted the 2005 Scotiabank Giller Prize on November 8 at a gala ceremony at Toronto's Four Seasons Hotel. Bergen claimed Canada's richest award for fiction, worth $40,000 for The Time In Between. The novel is a story about a brother and sister who travel to Southeast Asia to look for their father, a Vietnam veteran who has disappeared there. The Giller Prize was founded in 1994 by businessman Jack Rabinovitch to honour the memory of his late wife, former Montreal Star literary critic Doris Giller. Past Giller recipients have included such literary heavyweights as Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje and Alice Munro.
Wayson Choy's second novel, All That Matters, has been longlisted for the 2006 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, one of 132 books nominated by libraries the world over. The shortlist will be announced April 5, and the winner June 14. Edward P. Jones' THE KNOWN WORLD won last year. The prize is worth £100,000. Ten other Canadian books are also nominated.
As well, on November 18, 2006, the Literary Review of Canada published a selection of the 100 Most Important Books in Canadian History, which included Wayson Choy's first novel, The Jade Peony (1995).
Anita Badami's novel The Hero's Walk (Knopf Canada), about an Indian grandfather's struggle to raise his Canadian-born grandchild, was awarded the tenth annual Premio Citta di Gaeta, a prize for the best in the literature of travel and adventure in translation. The prize includes a cheque for 3000 Euros. The book was published in Italy earlier this year by Marsilio under the title Il passo dell'eroe. In June in Mogliano Venet,o just north of Venice, The Hero's Walk was awarded the seventeenth annual Giuseppe Berto Literary Prize for the best first novel translated into the Italian language in 2005. (Although it is her second novel, it is the first to be translated into Italian.) The prize included a cash award of 7500 Euros.
Novelist (George & Rue), poet, playwright, librettist, and scholar George Elliott Clarke is the second writer to receive a prestigious Trudeau Foundation Fellowship, an award worth up to $225,000 over three years. Now in its third year, the foundation says on its web site that its goal is "to generate and enhance public debate on society's major issues and to provide citizens of Canada and the world with a deeper experience of, and commitment to, democracy" by establishing "a unique dialogue between outstanding scholars in the social sciences and humanities and creative individuals." Trudeau Fellowships cannot be solicited and there is no peer or self-nomination, "so recipients are unaware that they have even been considered.... All were the subject of a confidential and rigorous nomination and review process, and all are being rewarded for outstanding contributions to the social sciences and humanities." There were five winners this year. Last year, novelist Rohinton Mistry won a fellowship. George and Rue will be released in the UK in August 2005 and in the US in February 2006.
Wayson Choy's All That Matters was announced as the English-language winner at the 18th Annual Trillium Book Awards. All That Matters is the much-awaited sequel to Choy's first novel, The Jade Peony.
The Jade Peony is told from the point of view of Chinatown's first generation of native-born children, as they struggle to reconcile their intense, mysterious community — riddled with secrets and often shaken by dramatic change — with the larger world they first encounter at school.
In All That Matters Choy continues the story of the Chen family, this time narrated by First Son, Kiam-Kim. Dwelling on Kiam-Kim’s sense of responsibility to his community, Choy unfolds the Chen family’s secrets in thoughtful and luminous prose, leading the reader to a breathtaking conclusion that far transcends the limits of its time and place, and gestures towards all humanity.
The Trillium Prize is awarded to the best book by an Ontario writer published in 2004. Along with the prestigious honour, Choy took home a cheque for $20,000.
Novelist Edward O'Connor has been awarded a 2005 K.M. Hunter Artist Award by the Ontario Arts Council and the K.M. Hunter Charitable Foundation. The awards are designed to support and encourage artists who have completed their professional training and have begun to establish themselves and make an impact in their chosen field. Every year, six awards of $8,000 each are presented in the fields of dance, literature, music, theatre and visual arts. O'Connor was the only winner in the literature category. He submitted a manuscript for a collection of stories, one of which, "Heard Melodies Are Sweet", will appear in this year's Journey Prize Anthology of the best Canadian short stories published last year. The story was originally published in The Fiddlehead (Spring 2004).The anthology will be released in October, and the prize-winner will be announced in March 2006.O'Connor has previously published a novel, Astral Projection (Random House, 2002).
The Harry Jerome Award for Professional Excellence was awarded to The Hanging of Angélique author, poet, and scholar Afua Cooper at a gala banquet on April 16, 2005. Established in 1983 by the Black Business and Professional Association, the awards honor the memory of Canadian Olympian, scholar, and social activist Harry Jerome, and the banquet helps to support scholarships for black Canadians. The Award for Professional Excellence is the highest overall prize.
Seventeen Tomatoes (Vehicule Press, 2004) by Jaspreet Singh is the winner of the 2004 McAuslan First Book Prize from the Quebec Writers' Federation: "Singh's pitch-perfect prose, glistening with crystalline imagery and inspirations from the unconscious, begs to be read aloud. He is surely a young writer to watch."
The Best Thing For You (McClelland & Stewart, 2004) by Annabel Lyon, was shortlisted for the 2004 Vancouver Book Award. The independent panel of judges citation for The Best Thing For You reads: "Three subtle and evocative novellas about Vancouver in different eras, each with their own temper and mood, but all deftly handled with discipline, richness and economy of form."
The Perpetual Ending (Knopf, 2003) by Kristen den Hartog was shortlisted for the 2004 City of Toronto Book Award.
George Bowering has completed his appointment as Canada's first ever Parliamentary Poet Laureate. George began to serve in this capacity on November 8th, 2002 and served until November 24, 2004. The duties of the two-year appointment included writing poetry for use in Parliament on special occasions, sponsoring poetry readings and advising the parliamentary librarian on the library’s collection. See his parliamentary website for further information.
"Inspired in part by the Westray mining disaster, Leo McKay Jr.'s bestselling novel Twenty-Six is set in a small Nova Scotia town, where a family is changed forever after a devastating mining accident claims the lives of twenty-six men. In the aftermath of the explosion, and as the investigation into its causes unfolds, the members of the Burrows family are forced to confront each other - and themselves - bringing the novel to its moving and redemptive conclusion." —Writers Federation of Nova Scotia website
AUSTIN CLARKE'S THE POLISHED HOE WINS MULTIPLE AWARDS
Finalist for the 2004 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction
At a gala banquet at the University Maryland on Friday night, Austin Clarke's The Polished Hoe was chosen as one of two finalists for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction, awarded annually to writers of African descent. In additional to one $10,000 prize, awarded that evening to Hunting in Harlem by Mat Johnson (Bloomsbury), the finalists each receive a $5,000 cheque. The award was accepted on Clarke's behalf by his US editor, Dawn Davis of Amistad/HarperCollins, because the author is in Australia promoting the novel there.
The Commonwealth Writers Prize 2003 for Best Book
"Beautifully drawn, elegantly rendered, a tour-de-force, The Polished Hoe is a wide-ranging epic in which the experience of several generations of women is masterfully realized. Beginning in a chilling statement made to a policeman after a murder, a woman’s voice, speaking in the shadowy reaches of a plantation house in the 1950s slowly uncovers layers of disturbing history. But Mary-Mathilda is more than protagonist, she is a haunting that leaps outside the pages of the novel and indicts empires of colonialism and masculinity; she is the unsettled presence, the un-beheld, the un-held, the fetishised, un-loved. In her singular and final act of self-narration her mind is dangerous, her hand ultimately and inexorably nightmarish. The Polished Hoe is a richly crafted novel which eludes, defies categories; it is variously wistful and agonizing, ironic and sensual; a tragic tale, relentlessly wrought." —Commonwealth Prize Judging Panel Chair, Dionne Brand
The 2003 Trillium Book Award
“Austin Clarke has transcended the earlier achievements of his already illustrious career with The Polished Hoe by composing a Faulknerian evocation of the Caribbean voice, recounting a somnolent, nocturnal dialogue between a black murderess and a black constable, both of whom confront the racist horror of their own past as they divulge the secrets of both their love and their loss.” —Christian Bök, Jan Geddes and Lesley Kruger, jurors for the Trillium Book Award
The 2002 Giller Prize
"Austin Clarke's The Polished Hoe is a symphony of Caribbean life and history that arranges the jangle of race and class, rage and passion into an eloquent composition, part slave narrative, part love ballad, part Shakespearean opera, sung against the backdrop of one woman's life. A master of narrative strategies and orchestrations, Clarke creates in Mary Mathilda an evocative and elegant voice that turns the written word into oral performance and fills our imaginations with the smells and sounds and silences of a world seldom seen and little understood." —Jury Comments
Warren Cariou was awarded this Canadian literary award, presented annually by the Writers' Trust of Canada for the best work of biography, autobiography, or personal memoir, for his powerful and moving story Lake of the Prairies: A Story of Belonging.
"A timeless and universal tale, full of charm, humour, intelligence and, above all, love." —Michael Bliss, Ron Graham and Heather Robertson, jurors for The Drainie-Taylor Biography Prize
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