Lubrin lands $10K award for debut fiction

Canisia Lubrin may need to upgrade her literary trophy case soon.

On June 5, Lubrin’s Code Noir was named the winner of the $10,000 Writers’ Union of Canada Danuta Gleed Literary Award, presented to the best first collection of short fiction by a Canadian author in English. The win comes just months after Lubrin won the US$150,000 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction for the work of “linked fictions.”

Code Noir also landed on the short lists for the Writers’ Trust of Canada’s Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award for English-language fiction.

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Lubrin has landed big awards in both poetry and fiction — her 2020 poetry collection The Dyzgraphxst won the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2021, an award which came with $65,000.

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More prizes: Montreal’s Valérie Bah has won the $60,000 Amazon Canada First Novel award for their book Subterrane, published in October 2024 by Véhicule Press.

Dubbed a “speculative comedy,” the book focuses on the Black and queer voices in the fictional North American metropolis of New Stockholm, and how communities in cities are being short-changed in the name of prosperity.

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A number of Manitoba authors have won the Amazon Canada First Novel Award in previous years, including Joan Thomas in 2009 for Reading by Lightning, katherena vermette in 2017 for The Break, Michael Kaan in 2019 for The Water Beetles and Casey Plett in 2020 for Little Fish.

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Looking for an ideal (and somewhat last-minute) Father’s Day gift? Winnipeg music historian and author John Einarson will be signing copies of his latest book From Born to Be Wild to Dazed and Confused: Rock Music’s Revolution in 1968 at the Indigo at St. Vital Centre from 1-3 p.m.

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Michael Decter launches his second novel The Fulcrum at 7 p.m. tonight at McNally Robinson Booksellers’ Grant Park location in one of the bookstore’s last readings before summer.

The novel, Decter’s second work of fiction and ninth book overall, follows a budding climate scientist and his long-distance beau, she also a scientist, who encounter a woman on the run from the IRA in Cambridge, Mass. that derails their plans. Meanwhile, the hurricane to end all hurricanes is bearing down on Miami. Can anyone be saved?

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The Prairie Comics Festival and At Bay Press are co-hosting the launch of the latest graphic novel about four young women in the 1980s hell-bent on justice in the face of the exploitation of women.

Curb Angels: Pound for Pound picks up the story the quartet launched in 2019’s Curb Angels, written by Christopher Ducharme and illustrated by Lisa Mendis. The latest volume, written by Nyala Ali and illustrated by Mendis, catches up on the foursome as they continue to fight injustice.

The launch of Curb Angels: Pound for Pound takes place Tuesday at 7 p.m. in the Prairie Comics Festival studio (611-70 Arthur St.), where Ali, Mendis and typographer Lucas C. Pauls will read from and discuss the graphic novel. Copies of both volumes will be available to purchase and get signed; the event is free to attend.

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Local authors will convene at Sookram’s Brewing Co. (479-B Warsaw Ave.) on Wednesday at 7 p.m. as part of the fourth Wild & Wonderful Words reading event.

Hosted once again by creator and local author Sheldon Birnie (Where the Pavement Turns to Sand), the event will feature readings by Ariel Gordon (Fungal, Treed, Stowaways), Mitchell Toews (Pinching Zwieback), Antonio Marrazas Luna and Zoë Mills. The event is free and all ages.

books@freepress.mb.ca