PAPER CHASE: Elrick blankets Ace Art with multimedia project

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This article was published 03/11/2012 (5023 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

WINNIPEG poet Michelle Elrick has taken inspiration from the common childhood pastime of building blanket forts in her latest multimedia project, to be launched Friday at Ace Art.

Elrick, who won the 2011 John Hirsch award for most promising Manitoba writer, has built a series of blanket forts in Manitoba and Reykjavik, Iceland, and documented them in poetry, film and photographs.

The fort-building is a kind of performance art focusing on the sense of place and idea of home. The event at Ace Art will feature a reading from her fort poetry, short film screening and a musical performance. Doors open at 8 p.m., with the performance beginning at 8:30 p.m. For more information, see www.notesfromthefort.com.

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At a time when the Canadian book world is being hit with bookstore closings and publisher bankruptcies, Manitoba author Anita Daher has found a way to reach a big readership with her books about girls and their horses.

Daher has a deal that will see three novels published in six Scandinavian and Central European countries and distributed through a book club with 56,000 members. The first novel, Panic on Horseback, was published recently in Norwegian.

The new novel will be joined by her forthcoming books, The Hustle and Wager the Wonder Horse, in Norway, Sweden, Finland, Germany, Hungary and the Czech Republic. Wager isn’t just the name of a fictional horse. Daher and her daughter owned a horse named Wager, whom the Winnipeg-author describes as a real-life wonder horse.

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After winning last year’s Scotiabank Giller Prize, and making the short list for just about everything else, with her novel Half Blood Blues, Victoria-based novelist Esi Edugyan is moving to HarperCollins with her next book.

HarperCollins Canada announced last week that Edugyan’s next novel is the first to be signed by the firm’s new imprint, Patrick Crean Editions.

A Canlit veteran, Crean had spent many years at Thomas Allen Publishers, which published Half Blood Blues. HarperCollins acquired rights to Edugyan’s new book, as yet untitled, under a two-book deal.

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Fans of Roddy Doyle know that the Irish author of The Commitments and Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha is a master of dialogue.

So they may want to check out his new book, Two Pints, being released Tuesday as an ebook original distributed by Random House Canada. The book is described as “a sublimely funny collection of dialogues inspired by a year’s worth of news.”

Doyle, a comic novelist turned serious, was one of the jurors who selected Will Ferguson, a comic novelist turned serious, for this year’s Scotiabank Giller Prize for his novel 419.

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