Canadian sculptor carves out new book

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This article was published 20/05/2017 (3388 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Winnipeg theatre lovers enjoy the work of Canadian sculptor Ruth Abernethy every time they visit the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre — she created the sculpture of founders John Hirsch and Tom Hendry in front of the main entrance.

The artist, who has also created public sculptures of Glenn Gould, John A. Macdonald and Oscar Peterson, discusses her life and work in Life and Bronze: A Sculptor’s Journal, which she launches Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. at McNally Robinson Booksellers.

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Winnipeg writer Craig Terlson goes back to the Watergate years in his new novel Fall in One Day, which he launches Thursday at 7 p.m. at McNally Robinson.

In the summer of 1973, a teenager searches for a missing friend and unravels secrets about a mental institution and LSD in the novel, Terlson’s third, following Correction Line and Surf City Acid Drop.

A graphic designer by day, Terlson has illustrated magazines and books for 26 years, including one children’s book by the late Sheldon Oberman.

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If McMansions are too pricey and tiny homes too spartan, Lloyd Kahn, the former editor at the Whole Earth Catalog website, has a book for you.

Kahn’s latest book, Small Homes: The Right Size, is filled with ideas for homes 1,200 square feet or smaller, for people who want to save money and have a lower environmental footprint without living in a shoebox.

He launches the book Thursday at 7:30 p.m. at McNally Robinson.

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Novelist Yann Martel, poet Louise Bernice Halfe and nature writer Trevor Herriot won multiple awards at this year’s Saskatchewan Book Awards.

Martel, who has made Saskatchewan home since a stint as writer in residence at the Saskatoon Public Library, won both the Regina Public Library and Saskatoon Public Library book of the year awards for The High Mountains of Portugal, a novel set in the Iberian nation (which doesn’t actually have any high mountains).

Halfe won the awards for poetry and indigenous writing for Burning in This Midnight Dream, a collection inspired by her residential school experiences and in response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Herriot won the City of Regina award and the University of Regina Press won a publishing award for Towards a Prairie Atonement, a book about Prairie history, connections to the grassland, the dispassion of the Métis and the privatization of community pastures.

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Novelist and memoirist Richard Wagamese, who died in March at age 61, won one final literary award at the British Columbia Book Awards April 29.

Wagamese’s memoir Embers: One Ojibway’s Meditations won the Bill Duthie Booksellers Choice Award.

The big winner at the B.C. awards was novelist and visual artist Douglas Coupland, who won the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence. Other prizes went to Jennifer Manuel for her novel The Heaviness of Things that Float, about a nurse serving at a remote First Nation who has become the “keeper of secrets” for the community, and Deborah Campbell for A Disappearance in Damascus, a non-fiction account of a journalist’s search for her local helper, taken by the secret police during her reporting in Syria.

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Ebook-seller Rakuten Kobo used online data, including customer reviews and reader completion rates, to select shortlists for the three categories in the this year’s third annual Kobo Emerging Writer Awards.

Six books, all by debut authors, were selected in each of the literary fiction, genre fiction and non-fiction categories. Best-known among the 18 books are Teva Harrison’s illustrated memoir of her experience with cancer, In Between Days; and Denise Donlon’s memoir of her career at MuchMusic, Sony Canada and the CBC, Fearless as Possible (Under the Circumstances).

The winners, to be announced June 27, will receive $10,000 each, plus marketing and promotional support.

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