Kinew, Beiko nab prizes at Aurora Awards

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This article was published 27/08/2022 (1479 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Manitoba NDP leader Wab Kinew is now an award-winning fantasy author for his young-adult novel novel Walking in Two Worlds.

His novel, which tells the story of the friendship of two teen gamers — one Indigenous and the other Chinese, with alter egos in the virtual world — won the best YA novel prize in the 2022 Aurora Awards, conferred by the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association. A sequel, The Everlasting Road, is slated for publication in 2023.

Kinew earlier wrote The Reason You Walk, a memoir about his relationship with his father, which was published in 2012.

Other Aurora Award winners this month included former Nebula Award winner Fonda Lee, who won the best novel prize for Jade Legacy, the latest in her award-winning Jade City series; Alberta writer Premee Mohamed, who won the best novella/novelette prize for The Annual Migration of Clouds; and Winnipeg author and artist Samantha Beiko, who won the best artist award.

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Many authors hope that their books will be food for thought. Poet and creative non-fiction writer Ariel Gordon wants one of hers to be food.

This summer, after trading a copy of her recent book Treed (about urban forests) with fellow writer Shel Zolkewich in exchange for some oyster mushrooms, she hatched a plan to use a copy of her book to grow mushrooms.

Having bought mushroom grow kits from Tom Nagy of River City Mushrooms, she asked Nagy if he could use a copy of Treed to grow a batch. Her goal was to get a photo of the fungus growing from the book, as well as to have a tasty meal. She recently posted a photo of the first batch growing out of the book.

Even before she had a chance to cook them the mushrooms were already feeding Gordon’s writing. She’ll write about the experiment for a new book, Mushrooming, scheduled for publication in 2024.

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After living under threat of death for more than 30 years, Salman Rushdie continued his advocacy for free expression right up until his near-fatal stabbing this month.

Shortly before the attack, Rushdie contributed to India at 75, a collection of statements and essays on the state of free expression in the nation of his birth. Commenting on how the Hindu-nationalist BJ party has attacked the nation’s multiculturalism and liberal democracy, he wrote: “We celebrated one another’s festivals, and believed, or almost believed, that all of the land’s multifariousness belonged to all of us. Now that dream of fellowship and liberty is dead, or close to death. A shadow lies upon the country we loved so deeply.”

The full document, produced by the free expression organization PEN and containing statements from more than 100 Indian and Indian diaspora writers, is available at pen.org/india-at-75/

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A federally funded program, announced in the 2019 budget, has recently allowed for nearly 600 Canadian books to be converted into ebooks in accessible formats.

The government’s Accessible Digital Books initiative set aside $22.8 million over five years to support Canadian publishers in making books in accessible formats. Accessible features include scalable text, alternative text for images and other features. Currently, less than five per cent of ebooks are accessible to readers with print disabilities.

The Literary Press Group, representing Canadian independent publishers, recently announced the collection of new accessible titles, representing novels, short fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, plays, graphic narratives and children’s books from 23 different publishers.

Among the books that will soon be available are the best-selling young adult dystopian novel The Marrow Thieves, by Cherie Dimaline; Scarborough, by Catherine Hernandez, which won Ontario’s Trillium Award and has been adapted into a film available on Crave; Jane Munro’s Griffin-Prize winning poetry collection Blue Sonoma; and Days By Moonlight, the Roger’s Writers’ Trust-winning novel by André Alexis.

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