Words from the heartland

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This article was published 30/12/2024 (644 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Winnipeg authors once again flexed their literary muscles in a big way this year, delivering an impressive lineup of fiction, non-fiction and poetry in 2024.

Ruminating on life in Winnipeg proved to be a common thread that ran through five of the most notable books published in 2024, with those reflections often exploring themes that resonated beyond our province’s borders.

It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that they landed on bestseller lists across the country, with many earning spots as finalists for national book awards and two taking top prizes.

Who We Are: Four Questions for a Life and a Nation

By Murray Sinclair (McClelland & Stewart, $40)

Published just over a month before his death in November, Murray Sinclair’s Who We Are weaves the late senator, judge, activist, father and grandfather’s personal, lived experience into a broader history of Indigenous communities in Canada.

As the title suggests, the questions Sinclair poses — Where do I come from? Where am I going? Why am I here? Who am I? — are as important as the answers he strives to uncover and share, leaving readers with a moving volume of some of his last written words.

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Wînipêk: Visions of Canada from an Indigenous Centre

By Niigaan Sinclair (McClelland & Stewart, $36)

Like father, like son — Murray Sinclair’s son (and Free Press columnist) Niigaan Sinclair also released a work of non-fiction, his first, which won this year’s Governor General’s Literary Award for non-fiction. “I was with my dad when I found out that I won,” Sinclair recalled shortly after the win was announced. “We celebrated that morning — Dad gave me a hug. There are very few times in my life that my dad and I have been able to celebrate together, because he travelled so much, but we got to celebrate in that moment when I won.”

Wînipêk weaves together Sinclair’s Free Press writing with other musings on our city, reconciliation, life as an Indigenous person in Canada and more to demonstrate how what happens in Winnipeg is reflective of the country as a whole.

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Scientific Marvel: Poems

By Chimwemwe Undi (House of Anansi Press, $22)

While already a well-known voice in the city, Winnipeg poet laureate Chimwemwe Undi arrived on the Canadian poetry scene with a bang in 2024 with her debut collection Scientific Marvel, winning this year’s Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry — the second year in a row a local poet has won the award.

Undi’s poems explore notions of gender, immigration, power, race, queerness and more; while they’re firmly rooted in Winnipeg, the universal themes that run through the collection speak to a broader audience. “I think a lot of the kinds of tensions that are faced by Canada, and by Turtle Island more generally, really come to a head in the city — issues of race and of policing and of poverty and the divisions between people that we’re experiencing, and also all of the great things about the world,” Undi told the Free Press shortly after her Governor General’s Literary Award win.

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Real Ones: A Novel

By katherena vermette (Hamish Hamilton, $35)

After her acclaimed trio of interconnected novels (The Break, The Strangers and The Circle), vermette returned earlier this year with a timely work of fiction that explores notions of identity, family, Indigeneity and more — including the “pretendian” phenomenon of someone falsely claiming Indigenous heritage and appropriating Indigenous culture. The book follows two Winnipeg Michif sisters whose white mother is called out for being a pretendian, and the repercussions it has on the family. “It started off as a meditation around the race-shifting phenomenon and what effect I felt it had on me, but that was more of a launching pad,” she told the Free Press. “It’s really about the reaction to it… our own sense of identity and what it means for us and how we’re affected, our emotional labour.”

Real Ones is a quicker, easier read than the Strangers trilogy, but touches on similarly crucial issues with the seemingly effortless humour, insight and reflection that populates all vermette’s fiction. The book was one of 12 to make the long list for this year’s Giller Prize.

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Everything and Nothing at All: Essays

By Jenny Heijun Wills (Knopf Canada, $35)

The followup to her 2019 memoir Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related., Everything and Nothing at All isn’t so much a sequel as it is a companion piece. “The memoir was very emotionally driven, very esthetically driven, and with (the new book) I wanted to do something that was a little bit more or differently cerebral and to provide the context from which that first book arose,” Wills told the Free Press at the time of the book’s release.

In Everything, Wills goes about unpacking notions of identity, beauty, family and exploring her relationship with reading, esthetics, her adopted and birth families, parenting and more. It landed her on the short list for this year’s Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, a prize she won for Older Sister.

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books@freepress.mb.ca

@bensigurdson