Unpublished Carol Shields short story up for grabs

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This article was published 10/07/2021 (1872 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Supporters of Winnipeg’s literary community can support the University of Winnipeg’s Carol Shields Writer in Residence program and get a rare opportunity to own a “new” work by the program’s namesake.

Donors to the program can receive a limited-edition book, produced by Barbarian Press, containing a recently uncovered short story by the author of The Stone Diaries and Larry’s Party. Only 200 copies of the book are in existence, and 150 of them will be offered to the first donors who make a new give of at least $100 to the program. Those donating less than $100 will be entered in a draw to receive a copy.

The story, Protein Dust, was discovered in the Shields papers at Library and Archives Canada by retired University of Alberta professor Nora Foster Stovel.

The Carol Shields Writer in Residence Program has featured writers in a variety of genres from Manitoba and across Canada, who provide advice for students and members of the community.

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Fans of the late John Le Carré will have one more chance this fall to experience his signature blend of spycraft and soul-searching when his publisher, Viking, launches Silverview, the only complete, unpublished novel he left behind when he died in December.

The book will be published Oct. 12, during the week the author would have turned 90. This year is the 60th anniversary of Le Carré’s first book, Call For the Dead, and of the building of the Berlin Wall, which played a prominent part in many of his most famous works, especially The Spy Who Came In From the Cold.

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Two Manitoba writers were among 10 from across Canada with stories shortlisted for the recent Writers’ Union of Canada Short Prose competition — including one who had three stories on the list.

Winnipegger Zilla Jones took three spots on the list with her stories 846.78, Captured and How to Make a Friend. Mitchell Toews of Rennie also made the list with Fetch. Their stories were among 785 entries in the annual competition.

Calgary writer Mirabelle Chiderah Harris-Eze won the $2,500 prize for her short story Dark, a story of a family’s day-to-day reality at the intersection of class and race.

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First-time novelist Michelle Good has earned her third major award for her novel Five Little Indians, picking up the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for Literary Fiction to go with the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Amazon Canada First Novel Prize.

In addition to Good’s novel, about five residential school survivors and their trauma responses, Kobo announced the winners of its emerging writer prizes for non-fiction and mystery writing. Eternity Martis won the former for They Said This Would Be Fun, a memoir of campus racism, and Emily Hepditch won the latter for The Woman in the Attic, about a woman who uncovers a mystery when she returns home to Newfoundland to help her mother move into an assisted living facility.

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Three Manitoba writers were among the winners of Indigenous Voices Awards announced on National Indigenous Peoples Day, June 21

Winnipeg teen author Brianna Jonnie won the $5,000 for published graphic novels, comics or illustrated books for If I Go Missing (James Lorimer), written with co-author Nahanni Shingoose of Ontario and illustrated by Neal Shannacappo of the Rolling River First Nation.

The $5,000 award for published poetry in English went to jaye simpson, a member of the Sapotaweyak Cree Nation, for it was never going to be okay (Nightwood Editions), a poetry collection called a “powerful love letter to NDN kids in care, trans youth, Indigiqueer kin, and many more.”

Samantha Martin-Bird, a member of the Peguis First Nation, won the $2,000 award for unpublished poetry for “the indian (adultery) act & other poems.”

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