PAPER CHASE: Instant Olympics book in print

An "instant book" recapping the Vancouver Olympics is already on the market.

Canadian Gold: 2010 Olympic Winter Games Ice Hockey Champions by Andrew Podnieks was released by Toronto's Fenn Publishing Group this week.

Printed at Friesens in Altona, the book was launched the day after the closing ceremonies of the Olympics and before the cleanup even started.

It details the men and women's hockey gold medal winning tournaments.

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U.S. thriller author John Grisham will be launching a series of mystery novels for children.

Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer is scheduled to be released in May. A second title is scheduled for 2011.

The books will be published by Penguin Young Readers Group and will feature a 13-year-old solving crimes.

Grisham is best known for his legal thrillers like The Pelican Brief and The Firm. Grisham has more than 250 million books in print in 29 languages.

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Ontario's Fireside Publishing House is hosting a national contest to write a historical fiction children's book about former prime minister Paul Martin.

The book will be part of the Leaders and Legacies series. In it, Martin will be approximately 12.

The series will imagine young PMs getting involved in adventures that foreshadow their later lives.

The contest deadline is Aug. 1.

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Quebec-based writer Janis Locas has written a novel partially set in Winnipeg.

La Maudite Québécoise is being published in French on March 11 by Quebec publisher Triptyque. It's the story of a Montreal journalist who goes to work in the French community in Winnipeg.

Locas lived in Winnipeg from 2001 to 2006.

Her first book, La Seconde Moitie, was released in 2005. It was shortlisted for the Manitoba Book Awards' Le Prix littéraire Rue-Deschambault that year.

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Prairie Fire Press and McNally Robinson Booksellers have announced the winners of their annual writing contest.

The Banff Centre Bill Carman Poetry Award was won by Alberta's Nora Gould. The fiction prize was won by Victoria's Jay Brown, and B.C.'s Jay Torrence won the creative non-fiction prize.

Winnipeg's Méira Cook won third prize in poetry.

This year the fiction division was judged by University of Manitoba English professor Warren Cariou after the original judge, Paul Quarrington, died of cancer.

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The six nominees for the 2009 Amazon.ca First Novel Award have been announced.

They are No Place Strange by Diana Fitzgerald Bryden, Come, Thou Tortoise by Jessica Grant, The Golden Mean by Annabel Lyon, Goya's Dog by Damian Tarnopolsky, Diary of Interrupted Days by Dragan Todorovic and Daniel O'Thunder by Ian Weir.

Winner of the $7,500 prize will be announced this spring in Toronto. Last year the winner was Reading by Lightning by Winnipeg's Joan Thomas.

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Naked Anabaptist, a new Facebook page, has been created to promote a forthcoming book by British-based Stuart Murray.

The Naked Anabaptist: The Bare Essentials of a Radical Faith is being released on April 1.

The book is a history of the faith and its essential nature. It is being published by Herald Press of the Mennonite Publishing Network based in Waterloo, Ont.

vanrooy1@hotmail.com

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition March 6, 2010 H8