Charles Taylor Prize reveals first ever longlist

Since it was launched in 2000, the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-fiction has traditionally been among the first major literary prizes celebrated in the new year.

Now, for the first time, organizers have revealed a longlist of titles under consideration, citing both “the large number of publishers’ submissions that are received each year” and “the opportunity to promote the best of these books in the all-important Christmas bookselling season.”

Selected from 115 submissions by a jury comprising Allan M. Brandt, Stevie Cameron, and Susan Renouf, the inaugural Charles Taylor Prize longlist is as follows:

• Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter by Carmen Aguirre (Douglas & McIntyre)

• Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest by Wade Davis (Knopf Canada)

• The Patrol: Seven Days in the Life of a Canadian Soldier in Afghanistan by Ryan Flavelle (HarperCollins Canada)

• Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe by Charlotte Gill (Greystone Books)

• Nation Maker: Sir John A. MacDonald: His Life, Our Times Volume Two: 1867–1891 by Richard Gwyn (Random House Canada)

• The Measure of a Man: The Story of a Father, a Son, and a Suit by J. J. Lee (McClelland & Stewart)

• Facing the Hunter: Reflections on a Misunderstood Way of Life by David Adams Richards (Doubleday Canada)

• Why Not? Fifteen Reasons to Live by Ray Robertson (Biblioasis)

• Afflictions and Departures by Madeline Sonik (Anvil Press)

• The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary: A Canadian Story of Resilience and Recovery by Andrew Westoll (HarperCollins Canada)

• Bad Animals: A Father’s Accidental Education in Autism by Joel Yanofsky (Viking Canada)

For those keeping count, D&M Publishers, Random House of Canada, and HarperCollins Canada all have multiple nominations. Six of the 11 longlisted titles also appeared on the longlist for the B.C. National Award for Canadian Non-fiction, which announced its shortlist last week.

The Charles Taylor Prize shortlist will be revealed Jan. 10, with the winner, who receives $25,000, being announced March 5.

BBC Short Story Award opens to international writers in 2012

In honour of the 2012 London Olympics, the BBC National Short Story Award will be rebranded as the BBC Short Story Award, and will open to international writers for one year only.

Since the £15,000 prize’s launch in 2006, only U.K. residents have been eligible. In 2012, the competition will be open to short story writers living anywhere in the world who have a previous record of publication in the U.K.

To reflect the anticipated breadth of international submissions, the BBC Short Story Award’s shortlist will include 10 titles instead of five, the BBC reports. Each shortlisted story will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in the lead-up to the winner announcement in fall 2012.

B.C. native D.W. Wilson won the award this year for “The Dead Roads,” a story about a road trip in the Kootenays from his debut collection, Once You Break a Knuckle. Wilson is living in the U.K. while he completes his Ph.D. in creative and critical writing at the University of East Anglia.

The deadline for submissions to the BBC Short Story Award is Feb. 27, 2012. To be eligible, stories must be either unpublished or published after March 1, 2011.

B.C. National Award for Canadian Non-fiction finalists announced

The B.C. Achievement Foundation has announced the shortlist for the B.C. National Award for Canadian Non-fiction.

Chosen from a longlist of 10 titles, the finalists are:

• Bad Animals: A Father’s Accidental Education in Autism by Joel Yanofsky (Viking Canada)

• The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary: A Canadian Story of Resilience and Recovery by Andrew Westoll (HarperCollins Canada)

• Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe by Charlotte Gill (Greystone Books)

• Human Happiness by Brian Fawcett (Thomas Allen Publishers)

Gill’s Eating Dirt was nominated earlier this year for the inaugural Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for non-fiction. Last month, Bad Animals won the Quebec Writers’ Federation’s Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-fiction.

The winner, who will receive $40,000, will be announced Feb. 6 in Vancouver.

Slideshow: Introducing the 2012 Canada Reads finalists

If yesterday’s CBC Canada Reads public meet-and-greet in Toronto was any indication, the non-fiction contest, which airs in February 2012, will be a battle fuelled by strong personalities.

Canada Reads host Jian Ghomeshi introduced the five finalists and their defenders to a large lunch-hour crowd in the CBC’s Barbara Frum atrium.

The event ranged from sweet – Marina Nemat’s enthusiastic greeting to her defender Arlene Dickinson (“It’s like meeting a fictional character [from] Jane Austen”) – to the intense, with celebrity lawyer Anne-France Goldwater’s threats to “bust the balls” of her competitors.

Click on the photos for event highlights.

Graphic novel and autism memoir among Quebec Writers’ Federation Award winners

On Nov. 22, the Quebec Writers’ Federation announced the winners of their annual literary awards at a gala in Montreal. The $2,000 prizes honour books published by Quebec authors in six categories.

Winners of this year’s prizes are as follows:

Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-fiction: Bad Animals: A Father’s Accidental Education in Autism by Joel Yanofsky (Viking Canada)

Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction: Niko by Dimitri Nasrallah (Véhicule Press)

A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry: A Complete Encyclopedia of Different Types of People by Gabe Foreman (Coach House Books)

QWF Prize for Children’s and Young Adult Literature: Milo by Alan Silberberg (Simon & Schuster)

Concordia University First Book Prize: The Truth of Houses by Ann Scowcroft (Brick Books)

Cole Foundation Prize for Translation (French to English): Apocalypse for Beginners (Vintage Canada), Lazer Lederhendler’s translation of Tarmac by Nicolas Dickner (Éditions Alto)

Winners and runners-up of the Quebec Writing Competition were also announced. A full list of prizewinners is available here.

GG win “surreal” for deWitt, “surprising” for Foran

Laureates of the 75th annual Governor General’s Literary Awards were announced on Tuesday in Toronto, with Patrick deWitt named the winner of the English-language fiction prize for The Sisters Brothers (House of Anansi Press) and Charles Foran awarded the non-fiction prize for Mordecai: The Life & Times (Knopf Canada).

Tuesday’s announcement marked the end of a busy fall awards season for deWitt, whose novel landed on four major shortlists and won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize earlier this month. With two high-profile wins for The Sisters Brothers under his belt, deWitt is still caught off guard by the fanfare surrounding his book, a darkly comic Western set in Gold Rush-era California.

“It’s surreal,” deWitt said just after the award was presented. “It’s hard to get a handle on it. I think that my reaction is something that will settle in over time, but right now it just seems very bizarre to me.”

In his acceptance speech, deWitt thanked the Canada Council for the Arts for its support in writing the novel, particularly after he was forced to begin looking for a job to make ends meet. “It wasn’t the thought of joining the workforce that unsettled me; it was the idea that the writing would have to wait,” he said. “This is at best an annoyance, but at worst the sort of interruption that could upset a book completely.”

After learning he had been awarded a Canada Council grant to finish the novel, deWitt said he returned to writing “with the all too rare feeling that I was doing precisely what I should be doing, without compromise.” A GG win gives him more writing time that deWitt said “will never be squandered.”

Foran’s biography of iconic Canadian writer Mordecai Richler is no stranger to the awards scene, either. The winner of the inaugural Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for non-fiction and the 2011 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-fiction, Mordecai is also nominated for the B.C. National Award for Non-fiction, to be handed out in 2012. Despite the continuing attention, Foran says he is surprised by each new win.

“It’s very pleasing and surprising to get so many juries to agree,” he told Q&Q. “To have, in this case, three major juries composed of very distinguished people all decide that my book was their most worthy – I’m very flattered.”

Foran added that the GG holds special significance for him. “When Mordecai Richler was winning prizes, there was only one – there was the Governor General’s,” Foran said. “And so the Governor General’s prize, from the time I started thinking about writing, was the prize you wished to win. And I think, in some ways, that remains the case. It holds its place of honour because of its legacy.”

Among the people Foran thanked was Richler himself. “I have been standing on the shoulders of a giant throughout,” Foran said.

Foran, deWitt, and winners in 12 other categories will each receive $25,000 and be honoured at a gala on Nov. 24 at Rideau Hall in Ottawa.

Foran, deWitt add GGs to literary accolades

Two of the most high-profile winners of the 2011 Governor General’s Literary Awards have already won major literary prizes this season.

Charles Foran won the non-fiction prize for Mordecai: The Life & Times (Knopf Canada), which last month won the inaugural Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for non-fiction and, earlier this year, the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-fiction. In total, Foran has earned $130,000 in prize winnings for his biography of the late Montreal author (and two-time GG winner for fiction). Foran is also in the running for the $40,000 B.C. National Award for Non-fiction, which will be handed out in 2012.

This year’s fiction winner is Patrick deWitt, whose comic Western, The Sisters Brothers (House of Anansi Press), also won the $25,000 Rogers Writers’ Trust Prize for Fiction.

In children’s literature, veteran author Christopher Moore won the text category for his non-fiction book From Then to Now: A Short History of the World (Tundra Books), and the prize for illustration went to Cybèle Young for her picture book Ten Birds (Kids Can Press).

Despite the mild controversy surrounding this year’s poetry shortlist, the prize went to Phil Hall’s Killdeer, one of three titles from alternative Toronto publisher BookThug. The drama prize went to Erin Shields for If We Were Birds (Playwrights Canada Press).

The French-to-English translation prize went to Donald Winkler for Partita for Glenn Gould (McGill-Queen’s University Press), by historian Georges Leroux, who won this year’s French-language non-fiction prize.

Each winner received $25,000 from the Canada Council of the Arts. Now in their 75th year, the awards were announced Tuesday morning in Toronto.

Keep watching Q&Q for more coverage.

Emma Donoghue’s Room wins Evergreen Award

Emma Donoghue’s novel Room (HarperCollins Canada) has won the 2011 Evergreen Award, to be presented on Feb. 3, 2012, in Toronto.

The Evergreen Award is administered by the Ontario Library Association as part of the Forest of Reading program, designed to expose adult library users to Canadian fiction and non-fiction. Library patrons are invited to vote for their favourite of 10 nominated titles.

“I am thrilled that with this award, Room will be part of such a valuable initiative to promote reading,” Donoghue said in a press release.

The other nominees for the prize were:

• The Night Shift, by Brian Goldman (HarperCollins Canada)
• Amphibian, by Carla Gunn (Coach House Books)
• Dahanu Road, by Anosh Irani (Doubleday Canada)
• Death Spiral, by James W. Nichol (McArthur & Company)
• Far to Go, by Alison Pick (House of Anansi Press)
• Still Missing, by Chevy Stevens (St. Martin’s Press)
• A Man in Uniform, by Kate Taylor (Doubleday Canada)
• The Tiger, by John Vaillant (Knopf Canada)
• Annabel, by Kathleen Winter (House of Anansi Press)

Canadians honoured at Moonbeam Children’s Book Awards

Several Canadian authors have won Moonbeam Children’s Book Awards, to be handed out at the Traverse City Children’s Book Festival in Michigan on Nov. 12.

Administered by Michigan publishing services firm Jenkins Group and Independent Publisher magazine, the awards have been presented annually since 2007 in 38 categories to honour excellence in children’s and YA writing and illustration. Books written in English or Spanish and intended for a North American audience are eligible.

Among the Canadian winners are Craig Russell, who was awarded the gold medal in the YA sci-fi/fantasy category for his novel Black Bottle Man: A Fable (Great Plains Teen Fiction); Roslyn Schwartz, who won the silver medal in the preschool picture book category for The Vole Brothers (Owlkids Books); and Rae Bridgman, who tied for the bronze medal in the preteen fantasy division for Kingdom of Trolls (Sybertooth).

A full list of the prize winners is available here.

$10,000 Alberta prize now open to books published out of province

Organizers of the Alberta Readers’ Choice Award, now in its third year, have taken steps to quiet a muted strain of controversy that has attached itself to the prize since its inception.

The $10,000 award, organized by the Edmonton Public Library and voted on by Alberta readers, had until now been open to all books published in Alberta, regardless of the author’s origin or city of residence. But Alberta authors who happened to be published outside the province – someone like, say, Scotiabank Giller Prize nominee Lynn Coady, who lives in Edmonton but is published by Toronto-based House of Anansi Press – would be ineligible for the award.

That is all going to change this year, judging by new criteria posted to the EPL website:

This year, works of fiction and narrative non-fiction (i.e., first edition full-length novels, short story collections or books of poetry) will be accepted by any author who has been a resident of Alberta for a minimum of 12 consecutive months immediately prior to the publication of the submitted work, and who currently resides in Alberta, no matter where the book was published. The change makes this truly an Alberta award and recognizes the exceptional writing talent in our province while encouraging readers to support Alberta authors.

As it turns out, both of the prize’s prior winners – Helen Waldstein Wilkes’ memoir Letters from the Lost (AU Press) and Michael Davie’s novel Fishing for Bacon (NeWest Press) – are by authors currently residing in B.C.