Readers aplenty at Prairie Fire mega-launch
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 25/06/2022 (1293 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
After two years of cancelled launch celebrations, Winnipeg-based Prairie Fire magazine is celebrating a return to in-person literary life on Tuesday, June 28 at Little Brown Jug Brewing Co. (336 William Ave.).
The event, hosted by poet Kristian Enright, will feature local writers who have had work published in the last six issues of the magazine. It starts with refreshments at 6:30 p.m., followed by readings at 7. Minors need to be accompanied by an adult.
Featured readers are Daria Salamon, Sarah Ens, Donna Besel, Tricia Wasney, Sarah Ens, Joel Robert Ferguson, Zilla Jones, Bob Armstrong, Amber O’Reilly, Cale Plett, Ozten Shabahkeget and Nuo Yang.
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Indian writer Geetanjali Shree is the winner of this year’s International Booker Prize for her novel Tomb of Sand, the first book originally written in Hindi to win the award for books translated into English.
She shares the £50,000 prize with her American translator Daisy Rockwell. Tomb of Sand tells the story of an 80-year-old woman who, after the death of her husband, travels against her family’s wishes from her northern India home to Pakistan, to face a trauma dating back to the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan.
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A professor of innovation studies at the University of Toronto is this year’s winner of the $50,000 Donner Prize, for books on public policy.
Dan Breznitz was awarded the prize for Innovation in Real Places: Strategies for Prosperity in an Unforgiving World, published by Oxford University Press.
The award jury declared the book “essential reading for anyone interested in policy for industry, science, finance, competition, and regional development,” noting that it “goes well beyond the current fetish for focusing on the highest end of technology in an attempt to emulate the admired, but inequitable, features of Silicon Valley.”
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If you were writing a satire of contemporary literary culture, you might come up with something like this:
A beloved, influential literary magazine with a veritable who’s who of past contributors is sold by its previous owners to a Las Vegas university looking to buy some cultural cachet. Then, when the university decides to cut costs, the magazine is sold to an e-commerce website called The Sex Toy Collective.
Except that actually happened this spring to the Believer, the magazine founded by writers Heidi Julavits, Vendela Vida and Ed Park and originally owned by McSweeney’s, a website founded by Dave Eggers.
After a national outcry, Paradise Media, the company behind the Sex Toy Collective, sold the magazine back to McSweeney’s. Stay tuned for more twists.
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Hong Kong-born, Vancouver-raised, New York resident Pik-Shuen Fung already had a successful first novel on her hands when her debut was published in the U.S. and Canada, with French, Italian and Turkish language editions in the works.
Now the author of Ghost Forest (Strange Light) is $60,000 richer after winning the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, which celebrates first-time Canadian novelists.
Her novel explores the challenge of grieving in a family that doesn’t talk about feelings. It’s the story of a woman revisiting memories of her deceased father, who remained in Hong Kong for work after the rest of the family moved to Canada ahead of the 1997 handover of the territory to China.
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A Saskatchewan writer has won this year’s Danuta Gleed Award for her stories inspired by her father’s experience in a Métis road-allowance community.
Arnolda Dufour Bowes won the $10,000 prize for 20.12m: A Short Story Collection of a Life Lived as a Road Allowance Métis (Gabriel Dumont Institute). The title refers to the width of the strip of road allowance land on which such communities were often founded.
Bowes’s book was also a finalist in three categories in this year’s Saskatchewan Book Awards. The Danuta Gleed Award is presented annually to a book judged to be the best first collection of short fiction.
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