Book awards short lists bring diverse finalists

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This article was published 14/05/2022 (1543 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Dig beyond the Manitoba Book Awards’ short lists for the top prizes — book of the year, best fiction, best non-fiction — and the lists offer plenty of additional excitement.

The finalists for the Eileen McTavish Sykes award for best first book are MaryLou Driedger for her young adult novel Lost on the Prairie, Rowan McCandless for her experimental memoir Persephone’s Children: A Life in Fragments, musician Errol Ranville for his memoir Run As One: My Story, Dr. Jillian Horton for her memoir We Are All Perfectly Fine and Primrose Madayag Knazan for her cultural cooking show novel Lessons in Fusion.

The Lansdowne prize for poetry finalists are Joanne Epp for Cattail Skyline, Tamar Rubin for Tablet Fragments, Joel Robert Ferguson for The Lost Cafeteria, Sarah Ens for The World is Mostly Sky and Laurent Poliquin for L’ivresse fragile de l’aube.

[Editor’s note: Paper Chase scribe Bob Armstrong is himself shortlisted in two categories, including the top fiction prize as well as the Michael Van Rooy award for genre fiction. Other nominees in the latter category are Craig Terlson for Manistique, Catherine Macdonald for So Many Windings, C.C. Benison for The Unpleasantness at the Battle of Thornford: A Father Christmas Mystery and editors Darren Ridgley and Adam Petrash for the collection Alternate Plains: Stories of Prairie Speculative Fiction.]

The awards will be doled out June 9; for the full list of shortlisted books and authors see manitobabookawards.ca.

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Winnipeg writer Brigette DePape, who debuted as a playwright at the Fringe as a teenager, launches her debut collection of poetry today at McNally Robinson Booksellers at 7 p.m. in a hybrid in-person/online (via YouTube) event.

DePape’s collection, Sun Compass, touches on resilience and trauma. She’ll discuss the book with Mercy Oluwafemi, who works for the Winnipeg Foundation, specializing in youth and philanthropy.

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Local artist Jonathan Dyck brings the fictional Mennonite town of Hespeler, Man., to life in his first book, a graphic novel entitled Shelterbelts.

A series of interconnected tales introduces readers to a church where a pastor and his queer daughter are trying to make the congregation more inclusive, a pipeline project that is dividing the town and a librarian who’s leaving suggestive notes to readers in popular books.

Dyck launches the new book Thursday, May 19 at 7 p.m. at McNally Robinson. The launch will also be streamed on YouTube.

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Norma Dunning, the Inuk author who won the 2021 Governor-General’s Award for English fiction, is one of the contenders in this year’s Alberta Literary Awards.

Her short-fiction collection Tainna: The Unseen Ones, a series of stories featuring Inuk characters living in Canada’s south, is up for the prize for short-fiction collections, along with Lori Hahnel’s Vermin, published by Winnipeg’s Enfield & Wizenty, and Double Wahala, Double Trouble, by Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike.

Nominees for the non-fiction category are Griffin Poetry prize-winner Jordan Abel, for Nishga; Omar Mouallem, for Praying to the West: How Muslims Shaped the Americas; and Julie Sedivy, for Memory Speaks: On Losing and Reclaiming Language and Self.

In the fiction category, nominated books are The Annual Migration of Clouds by Premee Mohamed, Bath Haus by P.J. Vernon and The Shade Tree by Theresa Shae.

The winning books will be announced June 1.

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National security, prosperity, economic opportunities for Indigenous people and the lives of elderly Canadians are among the public policy issues in the spotlight in the books shortlisted for the $50,000 Donner Prize for Public Policy.

Shortlisted books for this year’s prize are Innovation in Real Places: Strategies for Prosperity in an Unforgiving World, by Dan Breznitz; Value(s): Building a Better World for All, by former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney; Stand on Guard: Reassessing Threats to Canada’s Security, by Stephanie Carvin; Indigenomics: Taking a Seat at the Economic Table, by Carol Anne Hilton; and Neglected No More: The Urgent Need to Improve the Lives of Canada’s Elders in the Wake of the Pandemic, by Andre Picard.

The winner will be announced May 31.

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