Two of the finalists for last fall’s Scotiabank Giller Prize are in the running for the Danuta Gleed Award for the best first short story collection.

The winner of the $10,000 prize, administered by the Writers’ Union of Canada, will be announced Thursday.

Authors Kim Fu, for Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, and Rawi Hage, for Stray Dogs, were shortlisted for last fall’s Giller. They’re joined by Nada Alic, for Bad Thoughts, Kathy Friedman, for All the Shining People, and Saeed Teebi, who was shortlisted for the Writers’ Trust Atwood Gibson Prize for Her First Palestinian.

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Former Winnipegger Gillian Sze is this year’s winner of the Pat Lowther Memorial Award for her sixth book of poetry, Quiet Night Think: Poems and Essays (ECW Press).

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Sze, who has been a finalist for the Quebec Writers’ Federation’s poetry prize for each of her previous books, writes in her new book on language, culture, new motherhood and her origins as a poet. The Pat Lowther award, for the best book of poetry by a Canadian woman, is named for a poet whose writing career was cut short when she was murdered by her husband in 1975.

Other recipients of this year’s prizes from the League of Canadian Poets were Matthew James Weigel, who won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for the best first book of poetry, for Whitemud Walking (Coach House), and Adebe DeRango-Adem, who won the Raymond Souster Award for the best book by a League member, for Vox Humana (Book*hug Press).

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Award-winning Winnipeg romance and historical fiction author Kelly Bowen continues with the wartime-France setting of her most recent novel in The Garden of Lost Secrets (Grand Central Publishing), which she launches Wednesday at 7 p.m. at McNally Robinson Booksellers’ Grant Park location.

The novel features twin timelines — one in 1940 in Rouen, where a woman is involved in the resistance against the occupying Nazis, and the other in the present day, when a woman buys a crumbling chateau and uncovers its mysteries.

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After receiving a master’s degree in veterinary physiology from the University of Manitoba and working as a research scientist, Bowen become an author of historical fiction and romance, with her most recent novel, The Paris Apartment, also dealing with the resistance and occupied France.

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University of Winnipeg professor emeritus Jim Silver reaches back to the Middle Ages to delve into the history of poverty and efforts to control the poor or, occasionally, help them, in Scoundrels and Shirkers: Capitalism and Poverty (Fernwood Publishing).

Silver, a founding member of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives-Manitoba, launches the book Thursday at 7 p.m. at McNally Robinson’s Grant Park location, in conversation with Wayne Antony, a publisher at Fernwood and a fellow founder of the CCPA-M.

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Métis and French Canadian author Matthew Tétreault tells a story of Métis and family history in his debut novel, Hold Your Tongue (NeWest Press), which he launches Friday at 7 p.m. at McNally Robinson’s Grant Park location.

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Tétrault, who’s returned to Manitoba after earning a PhD in Métis literature and literary history at the University of Alberta, is also the author of the short-fiction collection What Happened on the Bloodvien. He launches the new novel in conversation with U of W professor of urban and inner-city studies Chantal Fiola.

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Alberta author Thomas Wharton takes a magical realist look at pressing environmental issues in his new novel, The Book of Rain (Random House of Canada).

The new novel is set in the northern mining town where a new source of energy known as ghost ore is produced. The material is worth 28 times its weight in gold, but it’s linked to slippages in the space-time continuum.

Wharton launches the novel Saturday, May 27 at 7 p.m. at McNally Robinson, in conversation with store owner Chris Hall.

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