Book award winners

Book award winners

First-time Winnipeg novelist Esmé Claire Keith was the surprise winner of the biggest prize at the Manitoba Book Awards gala on Saturday night.

Keith, a 48-year-old English teacher at St. John's-Ravenscourt School, took home the $5,000 McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award for her debut novel, Not Being on a Boat.

She beat out Wayne Tefs, George Amabile and Allan Levine, all authors with many titles under their belts.

"I was very surprised to win," the soft-spoken writer said after the ceremony, attended by more than 200 people at the Centre culturel franco-manitobain.

Mosque’s restorative justice program helps newcomers find their way

The Masjid Bilal is a chunky grey building just off Logan Avenue surrounded by warehouses and railyards. It looks more like a bunker than a mosque.

But on a summer Friday afternoon, its green-and-white carpeted interior is humming with activity. Two men in white robes and flat woolen caps are seated on the carpet poring over a copy of the Qur’an. A few young boys dodge through hallways, poking curious noses into open doors. At the back, next to a table piled with prayer mats, two girls in hijabs share schoolyard gossip. In the kitchen, women are cooking up pots of rice and chicken for people who will soon arrive for Friday prayers.

The Masjid Bilal is a community hub for members of Winnipeg’s African diaspora as well as Muslims from many other countries.

It’s also home to the Bilal Community and Family Centre, an innovative, community-centred nonprofit that is meeting vital needs for newcomers in this city.

Homeless standstill can’t be addressed until province, city collaborate

What we have here is a basic failure to understand the dynamics of homelessness.

Last week, the Free Press documented the friction between Osborne Village residents and business owners and homeless individuals seeking refuge at Oak Table, a drop-in centre that provides food, shelter from the heat and cold, and access to social services.

Oak Table operates out of space in St. Augustine Church, located on River Avenue just east of Osborne Street. The aforementioned residents and business owners, as well as employees of a daycare that operates out of the same church, all expressed concerns about discarded drug paraphernalia, garbage and open drug use by the people visiting Oak Table.

It’s not hard to sympathize with people who are tired of dealing with this mess and mayhem. Still, it should be said that Oak Table, a private not-for-profit organization affiliated with an umbrella social services agency called 1JustCity, is not in the wrong place.

Jets’ Perfetti motivated to prove his worth following ‘life-changing’ contract

Adam Lowry’s wedding was the main event, of course. But the Winnipeg Jets had even more reason to celebrate this past weekend as they returned from their off-season homes for a spirited summertime gathering.

Bombers battle back to beat Redblacks in OT

OTTAWA — For three and a half quarters, it looked like it was going to be a night Dru Brown would want to forget.

And in some ways, he still might want to erase Sunday from his memory because it wasn’t overly pretty.

But in the end, Brown got his revenge and the Winnipeg Blue Bombers recovered from a sloppy start to escape the nation’s capital with a 36-34 overtime victory over the Ottawa Redblacks.

The game literally went down to the wire as it remained tied after two overtime mini-games and had to be decided by alternating two-point conversion attempts from the 3-yard line — a first in CFL history as the new overtime format was introduced this season.