Bridgman translated for Icelanders

Enlarge Image

Bridgman: on the move

Winnipeg children's book author Rae Bridgman is on the move, and so is her latest novel, 2011's Kingdom of Trolls from Sybertooth Publishing in New Brunswick. Bridgman has taken up a recent trend among authors to attach their keyboards to treadmills and walk as they work.

As for her 2012 Manitoba Book Award nominated novel, she is having it translated for young readers in Iceland, where much of the novel is set. Bridgman says, "The 'magical, mythical and mysterious' is part of the Icelandic national psyche."

Kingdom of Trolls is the third book in Bridgman's MiddleGate fantasy series about two adventuring, magic-student cousins. She is working on the fourth.

The Manitoba Book Awards are slated for April 28.

-- -- --

Winnipeg author, educator and reviewer Dave Williamson says his new novel, Dating, is "a combination of personal experience, total fabrication, and everything in between."

His main character, Jenkins, first made an appearance in a short story more than two decades ago, but Williamson liked him enough to use him again. Dating was born after the author became widowed six years ago, and began thinking about "how an older fellow's sortie into the 'dating' world" might compare with how it would have been in the 1950s.

Williamson says he understands how some readers might think he is writing about himself, but most of it is "dreamed up or based on gossip or general feelings about 'the way it was.'" Dating, published by Winnipeg's Turnstone Press, will be launched Thursday, 8 p.m., at McNally Robinson Booksellers.

-- -- --

Manitoban Cameron Dueck took a little boat trip recently and has written about it in The New Northwest Passage: A Voyage to the Front Line of Climate Change. From Winnipeg's Great Plains Publications, it will be launched Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. at McNally Robinson.

The journalist, who currently lives in Hong Kong, was born and raised on a turkey farm in Mennville, a village near Riverton.

He developed a passion for sailing while travelling internationally, reporting for news media like Reuters and the Financial Times. During the summer of 2009 he led the four-month sailing expedition through the Northwest Passage that resulted in this book.

Dueck says he found Canada's Arctic to be "a crazy mash of modern and traditional." His favourite moment was "eating braided seal innards in a Sachs Harbour kitchen while watching a live New York Yankees game on satellite TV."

-- -- --

This year's Winnipeg Comedy Festival features comedians who moonlight as authors, like Sean Cullen, and also Winnipeg authors who write funny books. One of those is Bob Armstrong, who will read from his 2011 comic novel, Dadolescence, today at 12:10 p.m. on the main floor of the Millennium Library.

Armstrong is up for two Manitoba Book Awards this year. Dadolescence, published by Turnstone Press, is a finalist for the Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for best first book, and Armstrong has been nominated for the John Hirsch Award for most promising Manitoba writer.

Armstrong has long been known as a playwright, novelist, performer and freelance journalist.

anitadaher1@gmail.com

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition April 7, 2012 J8