Books programs on CBC Radio winding down

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This article was published 17/06/2023 (885 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The voice of literature in Canada will soon have an unfamiliar ring to it, following the retirement of two longtime CBC Radio shows on books.

Shelagh Rogers, who has hosted The Next Chapter for 15 years and has been on the air for 43, will air her last show June 24. The Next Chapter has focused on Canadian books and authors since 2008.

The next day, the host of a CBC show focusing on international authors — and Canadians with international stature — takes a bow, when Eleanor Wachtel finishes her run on Writers & Company with a special live-audience event.

The show, which Wachtel co-founded in 1990, has featured hundreds of in-depth interviews with some of the world’s most acclaimed writers, including Canadians Carol Shields, Mordecai Richler, Alice Munro and Michael Ondaatje and international luminaries including Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison, Kazuo Ishiguro and Zadie Smith.

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Two non-profit organizations dedicated to incarcerated people and their families are selling books and baked goods today at WestEnd Commons (641 St. Matthews Ave.), with proceeds supporting five prison libraries.

The book and bake sale, running from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., is being organized by the Manitoba Library Association’s Prison Libraries Committee and Bar None Winnipeg, which co-ordinates volunteer drivers who help family members visit inmates. The Prison Libraries Committee also offers visits with authors, books clubs and writing workshops.

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Winnipeg-based Great Plains Publications has rebranded with a new name, logo and motto.

In the rebranding, unveiled last week, Great Plains Press keeps a bison as its central image, but now it’s a stylized head-on depiction above “Great Plains Press: Stories that bind us.” Days before the rebranding, the press earned kudos outside Manitoba when one of its books — Wonder World, by K.R. Byggdin — won the $30,000 Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award.

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The press was founded in 1993 by Greg Shilliday and Ingeborg Boyens. The current leadership, Catharina de Bakker and Mel Marginet, began the process of succession in 2018.

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A free online event at the Winnipeg Public Library can help you find your ideal summer vacation buddy — if by “buddy” you mean “book.”

The Next Page Live event, taking place at noon on Tuesday, June 27, will have the theme Vacation Reads. Staff from the Millennium and Louis Riel libraries and the system’s outreach department will offer favourite vacation selections, and participants will be able to add their own recommendations in the online chat.

To take part, see wfp.to/NYm.

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Two writers from Saskatchewan and an independent Edmonton publishing house were winners in this year’s Crime Writers of Canada Awards of Distinction.

Anthony Bidulka won the best crime novel award for Going to Beautiful, about a celebrity chef who finds himself enmeshed in murders in a small town, along with his 78-year-old transgender neighbour. Fellow Saskatchewan author Joanne Jackson won the Howard Engel prize for the best crime novel set in Canada for A Snake in the Raspberry Patch, which focuses on a shocking small-town crime in 1971.

Both books were released by Stonehouse Publishing, which was established in Edmonton in 2014 with a focus on historical fiction.

The award for the best first crime novel went to Sam Shelstad for Citizens of Light (TouchWood Editions), a darkly comic tale of a woman who works in a call centre, lives a quiet life and has her husband turn up dead in a bog.

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Prolific novelist and essayist Thomas King won the Whodunit Award, for the best traditional mystery, for Deep House (HarperCollins), the latest in his series starring sleuth Thumps DreadfulWater.

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Rosemary Sullivan won the prize for the best non-fiction crime book for The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation (HarperCollins).

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