Shields prize long list includes six Canadians

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This article was published 16/03/2024 (584 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Six Canadian authors have made it to the 15-book long list for the second Carol Shields Prize for Fiction.

The prize is named after the late novelist who wrote much of her best-known fiction while living in Winnipeg and is awarded for excellence in fiction by women and non-binary writers in Canada and the U.S. A win comes with a US$150,000 prize.

The Canadian books on the long list are Cocktail by Lisa Alward, Daughter by Claudia Dey, Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton, A History of Burning by Janika Oza, Chrysalis by Anuja Varghese and The Future by Catherine Leroux (translated by Susan Ouriou), which recently won this year’s CBC book showdown Canada Reads.

The short list will be announced on April 9, with the winner announced May 13. Jurors for this year’s prize were Laila Lailami, Jen Sookfong Lee, Claire Messud, Dolen Perkins-Valdez and Eden Robinson. Last year’s inaugural prize went to Fatimah Ashgar for When We Were Sisters.

For the complete list of longlisted authors and more information about the prize, see carolshieldsprizeforfiction.com.

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Author and journalist Elizabeth Renzetti and novelist Kate Hilton have teamed up for their latest project, a thriller featuring a big city, middle-aged female journalist who ends up at a small-town paper and thrust into a murder mystery when a lauded actor ends up dead onstage.

Bury the Lead is the first of the Torontonians’ collaborative novels to feature reporter Cat Conway, with more in the works. The pair will be at McNally Robinson Booksellers’ Grant Park location on Thursday at 7 p.m., where they’ll be joined in conversation by Winnipeg-based Globe and Mail reporter Temur Durrani.

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National Poetry Month doesn’t kick off until April, but Winnipeg author Sue Sorensen is getting festivities started early.

Sorensen launches her collection Acutely Life, published by Winnipeg’s At Bay Press, on Friday at 7 p.m. at McNally Robinson’s Grant Park location.

Sorensen, who also teaches at Canadian Mennonite University and heads CMU Press, will be joined at the launch for a discussion with fellow writer Ariel Gordon.

Buy on mcnallyrobinson.com

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Burton Cummings has released his second book of poetry, The Writings of B.L. Cummings Volume 2.

The book by the former Guess Who singer and prolific solo musician features 51 poems and follows his first volume of poetry, which was published in 2016.

Copies of The Writings of B.L. Cummings Volume 2 are available on Cummings’ website starting at $75, with autographed and numbered copies also available. For more see wfp.to/jNp.

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Timothy Garton Ash’s Homelands: A Personal History of Europe has won the $50,000 Lionel Gelber Prize, presented annually by the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy to a book on international affairs published in English.

Buy on mcnallyrobinson.com

The book, published in May 2023 by Yale University Press, looks at Europe in the latter half of the 20th century and into the early 2000s through a combination of reportage and memoir.

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The Writers’ Prize has announced its winners for the first year since rebranding (it was formerly known as the Rathbones Folio Prize) and, for the second year running, all three top prizes were won by women.

The winners were announced at the London Book Fair on March 13; Anne Enright won the fiction prize for her novel The Wren, The Wren, Laura Cumming won the non-fiction prize for her memoir Thunderclap and Liz Berry won the poetry category for her novel-in-verse The Home Child.

While each of the category winners receive £2,000 (about $3,400), Berry’s poetry collection also nabbed the top prize, the Writers’ Prize Book of the Year award, which comes with an additional £30,000 (around $51,600).

books@freepress.mb.ca