Heather O’Neill among Giller jurors

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This article was published 24/02/2018 (3120 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Montreal author Heather O’Neill is part of a diverse group of writers who will judge this year’s Giller Prize.

Joining the two-time Giller nominee (for The Girl Who Was Saturday Night and Daydreams of Angels) are Canadians Kamal Al-Solaylee (journalist and author of Brown: What Being Brown in the World Today Means) and Maxine Bailey, a playwright and current vice-president of the Toronto International Film Festival.

The Canadian jurors are joined by the American literary critic and former editor of Granta John Freeman and British novelist Philip Hensher, whose book The Northern Clemency was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

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A University of Toronto professor’s examination of the history of the relationship between land, identity and the Haudenosaunee (Six Nations) of the Grand River area of Ontario is the latest book to be launched by University of Manitoba Press.

Author Susan Hill, director of the Centre for Indigenous Studies at U of T, launches the book Wednesday at 8 p.m. at McNally Robinson Booksellers, in conversation with University of Winnipeg history professor Mary Jane Logan McCallum, author of Indigenous Women, Work and History: 1940-1980.

Hill’s book, The Clay We Are Made Of: Haudenosaunee Land Tenure on the Grand River, covers the relationship with the land from the creation story through to the beginning of European contact and up to present-day land claims negotiations.

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Growing sales of general merchandise led Indigo Books and Music to its best quarter ever last October to December, with sales of $433 million and earnings of $42.6 million.

The company reports that revenue for the last quarter of 2017 was 8.2 per cent higher than the equivalent period in 2016. An article in Publishers Weekly notes that the company is continuing with its plan to reposition its stores as “cultural department stores for book lovers” and will remodel 20 of its Canadian stores by 2019. As well, Indigo is continuing with a plan to test three or four American locations in the next two years, beginning with one in New Jersey.

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Geography, the known and the unknown come together in the second poetry collection by U.K.-born Yukon resident Joanna Lilley, with If There Were Roads (Turnstone Press).

Lilley visits McNally Robinson Booksellers Thursday at 7:30 p.m. to launch the book, and will be joined by Winnipeg poets Carmelo Militano and Karen Clavelle.

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Canadian publishers have a heavy spring of new releases lined up, including intense literary works, topical takes, psychological thrillers and releases by winners of some of the country’s biggest awards.

Finishing out the winter releases is The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore (HarperCollins) by Kim Fu, author of For Today I Am a Boy, whose new novel details a group of girls who disappear from a camp.

March brings The Red Word (ECW Press), a contemporary novel of campus culture wars by Sarah Henstra; Hysteria (HarperCollins), a thriller by Elisabeth de Mariaffi about a woman with a gaslighting husband and a missing child; and The Italian Teacher (Doubleday), a novel about growing up the child of a famous artist, written by Tom Rachman, author of the international hit The Imperfectionists.

April releases include Tiger Tiger (Penguin), a short story collection by Giller Prize winner Johanna Skibsrud, with settings that range from a seniors’ centre to Mars; and Vi (Random House), a novel about Vietnamese refugees reinventing themselves, written by Canada Reads winner Kim Thúy.

That’s only scratching the surface. For a full preview of Canadian spring fiction, see wfp.to/springfiction.

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