Bergen best again at book awards

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This article was published 09/06/2022 (1556 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For the fifth time in his career and the second year in a row, Winnipeg novelist David Bergen has won the top prize at the Manitoba Book Awards.

On Thursday, June 9, Bergen was announced as the winner of the McNally Robinson Book of the Year award for his slim novel Out of Mind, published by Goose Lane Editions in September 2021. It follows last year’s win for his story collection Here the Dark; Bergen also won for 1996’s A Year of Lesser, 2005’s The Time in Between and 2009’s The Retreat.

There were a few surprises in terms of winners in some of the other categories, including a pair of prizes that saw two authors share wins. Rowan McCandless’s memoir Persephone’s Children: A Life in Fragments and Jillian Horton’s We Are All Perfectly Fine: A Memoir of Love, Medicine and Healing shared the Eileen McTavish Sykes award for best first book, while the Margaret Laurence Award for fiction was shared by Patricia Robertson for her story collection Hour of the Crab and Bob Armstrong for his western Prodigies.

The top non-fiction prize, the Alexander Kennedy Isbister award for non-fiction, went to Dadibaajim: Returning Home Through Narrative, by Helen Olsen Agger, while the Carol Shields Winnipeg Book award was won by Seream for his book Mont-Blanc-Winnipeg Express. The Lansdowne prize for poetry was won by Joel Robert Ferguson for The Lost Cafeteria, while the Michael Van Rooy award for genre fiction was won by Catherine Macdonald for her novel So Many Windings.

Among other winners were Tasha Spillett-Sumner for her picture book I Sang You Down from the Stars as the best book for young people (younger category), while Chimwemwe Undi was named the winner of the John Hirsch Emerging Manitoba Writer award.

For the complete list of winners, see manitobabookawards.ca.

ben.sigurdson@freepress.mb.ca