Songwriter’s children’s story up for book prize

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This article was published 05/08/2023 (793 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Buffy Sainte-Marie, former justice minister Jody Wilson-Raybould, 2022 Giller Prize finalist Tsering Yangzom Lama and Billy-Ray Belcourt, youngest winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize, are among the contenders in the 2023 B.C. and Yukon Book Prizes.

Belcourt, for A Minor Chorus, and Lama, for We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies, are on the short list for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Lama’s book is also shortlisted for the Jim Deva Prize for Writing that Provokes.

Wilson-Raybould is shortlisted for the Hubert Evans Nonfiction Prize for her book True Reconciliation: How to be a Force for Change.

Sainte-Marie’s Still This Love Goes On (illustrated by Julie Flett) is shortlisted for the Christie Harris Illustrated Children’s Literature Prize.

Winning titles will be announced Sept. 24. The full list can be found at wfp.to/NsP.

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Canadian author Rebecca Campbell imagines a Vancouver Island community ravaged by climate change in Arboreality, one of nine books nominated for the second-annual Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction.

The $25,000 prize is intended for works by authors who are “realists of a larger reality, who can imagine real grounds for hope and see alternatives to how we live now,” as the renowned American science fiction writer put it in a National Book Awards speech in 2014.

The full list of nominees can be found at wfp.to/Nsm.

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Katherena Vermette’s four-volume set of time-travelling adventure stories set in pivotal periods of Métis history is being published in a single volume with an accompanying foreword and an essay by two Métis academics.

A Girl Called Echo, illustrated by Scott B. Henderson and Donovan Yaciuk, focuses on a contemporary school girl who travels through time to four periods in Métis history, from the early 19th-century conflict that culminated in the Battle of Seven Oaks to the road allowance era that led to the Rooster Town shanty community.

The four stories will be published by Winnipeg’s HighWater Press in September, with a foreword by Chantal Fiola and an essay and timeline by Brenda Macdougall.

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Winnipeg-born author, activist and documentary filmmaker Astra Taylor will visit Winnipeg Tuesday, Sept. 5 as part of the annual Massey Lecture tour, speaking on the insecurity that is the common element uniting economic inequality, declining mental health, environment crises and the rise of authoritarianism.

Taylor’s lecture, The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Come Apart, will be published by House of Anansi Press on Sept. 5 and broadcast in the fall on CBC. The Massey Lectures, a partnership between Massey College and the CBC, have been broadcast since 1961, featuring a range of Canadian and international thinkers on politics, science and technology, society and art.

Taylor is known for her documentary film Zizek (on the hirsute Slovenian Marxist Slavoj Zizek), and books such as Occupy!: Scenes from Occupied America and The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age. She will speak at Prairie Theatre Exchange (393 Portage Ave.) at 7 p.m.

For more info and tickets to the lecture, see wfp.to/Nsu.

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Winnipeg multi-genre author David A. Robertson has three titles on the long list for this year’s First Nation Communities Read awards.

The $5,000 awards — in children’s and young adult/adult categories — celebrate Indigenous writing in Canada.

Robertson’s three books on the list are The Stone Child, the third part of his middle-grade Misewa saga; The Theory of Crows, an adult novel; and Version Control, part of his Reckoner Rises graphic novel series illustrated by Scott B. Henderson and Donovan Yaciuk.

Other books with Manitoba connection on the lists include The Case of the Rigged Race, by Michael Hutchinson; Broken Circle: The Dark Legacy of Indian Residential Schools, by the late Theodore Niizhotay Fontaine; Making Love With the Land, by Joshua Whitehead; Valley of the Birdtail, by Andrew Stobo Sniderman and Douglas Sanderson; Beautiful You, Beautiful Me, by Tasha Spillett-Sumner and illustrated by Salini Perera; and The Raven Mother, by Brett Huson.

The winners will be announced in October.

For the full list, see wfp.to/NsY.

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