Culinary prize finalists offer tasty treats

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The 2024 Taste Canada Awards have announced the finalists for Canada’s best cookbooks and writing on all things food and drink.

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This article was published 22/06/2024 (830 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The 2024 Taste Canada Awards have announced the finalists for Canada’s best cookbooks and writing on all things food and drink.

Among the more eye-catching of the English-language finalists for the prizes: Wine Witch on Fire: Rising from the Ashes of Divorce, Defamation, and Drinking Too Much, by Natalie MacLean; Let’s Eat: Recipes for Kids Who Cook, by DL Acken and Aurelia Louvet; Farmhouse Vegetables: A Vegetable-Forward Cookbook, by Michael Smith; Kings of Their Own Ocean: Tuna, Obsession, and the Future of Our Seas, by Karen Pinchin; and Kitchen Bliss: Musings on Food and Happiness (With Recipes), by Laura Calder.

The winners in both the English and French categories will be announced in the fall; for a complete list of the finalists, see wfp.to/y1z.

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The 2024 High Plains Book Awards, which doles out prizes to books that reflect life in the American plains and Canada’s Prairie provinces, have announced their list of finalists for the awards, which will be presented Oct. 5 in Billings, Mont.

Saskatchewan’s Michelle Good nabbed a pair of nominations for her book Truth Telling: Seven Conversations about Indigenous Life in Canada, as did Calgary’s Charlotte Bellows for her debut work of non-fiction The Definition of Beautiful. Winnipeg’s Colleen Nelson, meanwhile, earned a nod in the young reader/middle grade category for her book The Umbrella House, while Spirit of Denendeh Vol. 2: As I Enfold You in Petals by Richard Van Camp (and published by Portage & Main Press’ imprint Highwater Press) is among the finalists in the young adult category.

● ● ●

A new book of essays by Winnipeg-based author Jenny Heijun Wills has been announced by her publisher, Knopf Canada.

Wills’ debut book, her memoir Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related was published in 2019 and won that year’s Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Non-Fiction Prize as well as the Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best First Book at the Manitoba Book Awards.

Her forthcoming book, Everything and Nothing at All, is a collection of essays exploring language, identity, beauty, family and community and aspects of her life she must contemplate and reconcile along the way. The book publishes Aug. 27, and a fall launch in Winnipeg is planned.

● ● ●

Winnipeg author Erna Buffie is having her debut novel reissued following the closure of its original publisher.

Buffie’s debut novel Let Us Be True was originally published in 2015 by Regina’s Coteau Books; it was a finalist for the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction and the Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best First Book at the 2016 Manitoba Book Awards.

Coteau Books ceased operations in 2020, leaving Buffie’s book in limbo. It has been since picked up by Regina’s Shadowpaw Press, who will reissue Let Us Be True on July 9.

● ● ●

The first three books of David A. Robertson’s middle-grade series The Misewa Saga will now be sporting new cover art, the Winnipeg-based Swampy Cree author noted in a recent video on social media.

The Barren Grounds, The Great Bear and The Stone Child will feature new jacket art by Duluth, Minn.-born Ojibwa artist Winona Nelson, replacing the original work of Vancouver-based Métis illustrator Natasha Donovan. Nelson’s work already adorns the cover of the fourth book in the series, The Portal Keeper, which published in October 2023.

The fifth book in The Misewa Saga, The Sleeping Giant, publishes Aug. 6.; Robertson also noted in the video that he has finished writing the sixth book.

● ● ●

The Free Press Book Club’s next virtual meeting takes place Tuesday at 7 p.m., with St. Andrews author Patti Grayson joining the virtual meeting to read from and discuss her book The Twistical Nature of Spoons.

Published in September 2023, the book offers two narrative strands — of Ina, the mother, and Blisse, the daughter — and the secrets behind the twisted spoons Blisse received as gifts for her first 12 birthdays from her absent father.

The book club is free to join; for more information see wfp.to/bookclub.

books@freepress.mb.ca

Ben Sigurdson

Ben Sigurdson
Literary editor, drinks writer

Ben Sigurdson is the Free Press‘s literary editor and drinks writer. He graduated with a master of arts degree in English from the University of Manitoba in 2005, the same year he began writing Uncorked, the weekly Free Press drinks column. He joined the Free Press full time in 2013 as a copy editor before being appointed literary editor in 2014. Read more about Ben.

In addition to providing opinions and analysis on wine and drinks, Ben oversees a team of freelance book reviewers and produces content for the arts and life section, all of which is reviewed by the Free Press’s editing team before being posted online or published in print. It’s part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.

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