Prairie history wins research award

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This article was published 09/12/2017 (3203 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A book published by the University of Manitoba Press has won the Governor General’s History Award for Scholarly Research.

Imperial Plots: Women, Land and the Spadework of British Colonialism on the Canadian Prairies, by University of Alberta history professor Sarah Carter, examines homesteading on the Prairies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Carter studied how homesteading laws excluded women and told the stories of women who sought to own and farm their own land.

Carter has won several other awards for the book, published in 2016, including the Canadian Historical Association’s Clio award for the Prairie region.

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The Lonely Hearts Hotel, Heather O’Neill’s fairy-tale story of long-lost twins in Depression-era Montreal, won the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction at this year’s Quebec Writers’ Federation literary awards. O’Neill’s previous novels, Lullabies for Little Criminals and The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, were both shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize.

The Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-fiction went to Sandra Perron, for Out Standing in Her Field: A Memoir of Canada’s First Female Infantry Officer (Cormorant Books).

The Concordia University First Book Prize went to Jocelyn Parr for a novel set in Moscow in the early days of the Soviet Union: Uncertain Weights and Measures (Goose Lane Editions).

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Winnipeg poet Di Brandt is the city’s first poet laureate.

Brandt has written several collections of poetry since her first book, Questions I Asked My Mother, received the Gerald Lampert Award for the best first book of poetry. The book was recently reissued in a 30th-anniversary edition. She’s also collaborated with visual artists and musicians in multidisciplinary performance and installation pieces.

In her role as first poet laureate for Winnipeg, Brandt will host events in 2018 and 2019 for World Poetry Day, designated by UNESCO as March 21.

She talks with the Winnipeg Arts Council about how she became a poet, how Winnipeg has inspired her and the importance of poetry for all people at wfp.to/poetry.

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The award-winning author and filmmaker John Paskievich will take Winnipeg Public Library visitors on a photographic tour of the North End Tuesday in a presentation on the community.

The University of Manitoba Press has recently published his photo book The North End Revisited, reprinting his poignant photos of the neighbourhood where he grew up and has worked for 40 years. The new volume also includes 80 new images. Paskievich will present a slideshow of his work at the Millennium Library’s Carol Shields Auditorium from 12:10 to 12:50 p.m.

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Prolific author and longtime New Yorker staff writer Susan Orlean has been named to the Rogers Communications Chair in Literary Journalism at the Banff Centre.

Orlean’s work includes the book The Orchid Thief, which inspired the movie Adaptation; an article about female surfers in Maui, which inspired the movie Blue Crush; and a biography of the movie dog Rin Tin Tin.

In the program at the Banff Centre, she will lead month-long residencies for writers working in journalism and creative non-fiction. She takes over from Toronto writer Ian Brown.

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Katherena Vermette has received another award for her 2016 novel The Break. She won the Burt Award for Indigenous young-adult literature in November.

The Burt Award, overseen by the literacy and education organization CODE, comes with a cash prize of $12,000, plus purchase of 2,500 copies of each of the winning and honourable-mention books for distribution to schools, libraries and community organizations.

Books earning honourable mention were Susan Currie’s The Mask That Sang, about a girl who discovers her Cayuga heritage through a singing mask, and Aviaq Johnston’s Those Who Run in the Sky, about young Inuit shaman who must journey home from the spirit world.

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