City author MacDonald’s genial memoir wins top prizes

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This article was published 27/04/2003 (8499 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

WINNIPEG writer and journalist Jake MacDonald went home $8,500 richer last night after the Manitoba Writing and Publishing Awards.

MacDonald took home the $5,000 McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award and the $3,500 Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award for his genial memoir Houseboat Chronicles, published last fall by Toronto-based McClelland & Stewart.

The $5,000 Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award went to David Bergen’s novel The Case of Lena S., also published by M & S.

A Stranger to Myself, a collection of short stories by Don Bailey, won the $3,500 Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction.

“I’m getting a lot of action for being underdressed tonight,” said MacDonald, 53, who has already won this year’s $15,000 national Pearson Writers’ Trust Non-Fiction Prize, given to his tale of a city boy roughing it in the bush. “But when we first did these awards, I think we did them around an oil drum with lumber burning.”

Much swankier than previous outings, the 15th annual Manitoba event, titled Brave New Words, attracted more than 300 people to the Provencher Room of the Hotel Fort Garry, where 14 awards worth more than $30,000 were distributed to the province’s writers and publishers.

Crimes of the Century, about Manitoba’s most notorious criminals, won the $1,000 Mary Scorer Award for best book by a Manitoba publisher.

Written by Winnipeg Free Press reporter Bill Redekop, the book was released late last year by Winnipeg’s Great Plains Publications.

Linda Holeman won the older category of McNally Robinson Book for Young People Award for her young adult novel Search of the Moon King’s Daughter, published by Toronto-based Tundra Books.

Poet Marvin Francis was honoured with the $2,500 John Hirsch Award for the most promising new writer, thanks to his Turnstone Press collection City Treaty.

Another poet, Chandra Mayor, won the Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for the best first book for her August Witch collection, published locally by Cyclops Press.

The biannual prize for best francophone book, le Prix litteraire Rue-Deschambault, went to St. Boniface writer J.R. Leveille for his 2001 Les Editions du Ble novel Le soleil du lac qui se couche.

The Manuela Dias Book Design of the Year Award went to Gallant Design and Great Plains for the novel The 52nd Poem by Thomas Trofimuk.

The Best Illustrated Book of the Year Award went to artist Real Berard and designer Bernard Leveille for their Les Editions du Ble publication of a Gabrielle Roy story.

The Manitoba Historical Society’s three Margaret McWilliams Awards were also given out last night.

The prize for best scholarly book went to Walk Toward the Gallows by Tom Mitchell and Reinhold Kramer, published by Oxford University Press.

In the historical fiction category, veteran children’s author Carol Matas won for her diary youth novel Dear Canada: Footsteps in the Snow, published by Scholastic Canada.

The McWilliams award for best popular book went to A Thousand Miles of Prairie, edited by Jim Blanchard and published by the University of Manitoba Press.

Co-hosted by local comedians Al Rae and Dean Jenkinson, the event was co-sponsored by the Manitoba Writers’ Guild and the Association of Manitoba Book Publishers.

The awards are open to books published in Manitoba, as well as those written by Manitobans but published elsewhere.

McDonald has written several books, including the young adult novel Juliana and the Medicine Fish and the adult novel Raised by the River.

The AMPB has 18 members and estimates that it releases 100 titles per year. They run the gamut from popular fiction and non-fiction to books aimed at the academic and educational market.