Thin Air announces first authors at fall fest

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 30/07/2016 (3675 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Two award-winning Canadian authors making forays into new genres, as well as an author of multi-generational family sagas, are among the first guests announced for this fall’s Thin Air Winnipeg International Writers’ Festival.

Newfoundlander Lisa Moore, shortlisted for the Giller Prize for her short-story collection Open and novel Alligator (and winner of CBC’s Canada Reads for her novel February), will visit this fall to promote her first young-adult book, Flannery. The new book is the story of a schoolgirl who becomes a sensation when she makes a love potion for her entrepreneurship class.

Pamela Mordecai is the author of five poetry collections and has edited anthologies of Caribbean writing. She comes to Thin Air with her first novel, Red Jacket, the story of a girl with copper-red skin who lives on a Caribbean island with her black family. She’s also launching De book of Mary, the story of Mary, Joseph and Jesus written in Jamaican Creole.

Peter Behrens shot to literary fame when his first novel, The Law of Dreams, won the Governor General’s Literary Award for English-language fiction. This year, he’s touring with his new novel, Carry Me, which spans England, Ireland and Germany in the years during and after the First World War.

The festival runs Sept. 23 to Oct. 1.

● ● ●

A Ryerson University professor is the first winner of a US$50,000 award to honour the top unpublished manuscript with a female protagonist.

Laurie Petrou, who’s also the director of Ryerson’s writing and digital media program, won for her psychological thriller Sister of Mine, about two sisters and the secret they share. The award was established by Half the World Holdings, an investment program of venture capital firm Blackrun Ventures that invests in businesses for which women are the main consumers.

Ten Canadians made it onto the 40-author short list for the prize.

● ● ●

If you’ve ever wondered what a superhero comic by Margaret Atwood would look like, wonder no more.

A book trailer has been released for Angel Catbird, a three-part graphic novel about a superhero with cat and owl DNA, coming soon from Dark Horse Comics.

The trailer, with art by Johnnie Christmas, can be viewed at the book news website GalleyCat at wfp.to/es$.

● ● ●

Former Winnipegger Melissa Nawrocki was inspired by the beauty of her current home on Cortes Island, B.C. to create her new children’s book, Full Moon Lagoon, which she launches in Winnipeg Wednesday at 7 p.m at McNally Robinson Booksellers.

It’s the story of two friends who go diving in the island’s lagoon and find themselves washing up in a magical world.

In addition to writing several other children’s books, Nawrocki has also written a memoir of her time teaching at the Regional Support Centre in Selkirk, entitled Thanks for Chucking That at the Wall Instead of Me: Working With At-Risk Children and Youth.

● ● ●

Manitoba writer Oriole Vane Veldhuis made the three-book short list this month for the first Whistler Independent Book Awards for her self-published book about the life of her great-grandmother on the Criddle Homestead in western Manitoba.

Veldhuis’s book, For Elise: The Forgotten Woman of the Criddle Homestead, tells the story of Elise Vane, one of two women who lived at the historic homestead in the late 19th century and had children with Percy Criddle. The book had already been a remarkable success for a self-published book, selling more than 2,600 copies before the Whistler list was announced.

Orysia Tracz also received an honourable mention in the awards for her book First Star I See Tonight, described as the first in-depth English-language book on Ukrainian Christmas traditions.

Winners in four categories — fiction, crime, non-fiction and poetry — will be announced in Whistler, B.C., Oct. 14. The awards, sponsored by the Whistler Writing Society and Vivalogue Publishing, pay $500 to each winner and $250 to each finalist.

booknewsbob@gmail.com