Book links round-up: U of A’s new comics collection, Quentin Rowan on “literary kleptomania,” and more

• University of Alberta acquires 3,700-piece comic book collection
• Quentin Rowan (who writes as Q.R. Markham), accused of plagiarizing his debut spy novel, explains his “literary kleptomania”
• P.E.I. public library to give a free picture book to every Grade 1 student in the province
• U.S. National Book Awards go to “stories of resilience”

$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.

Random House, D&M lead nominations for B.C. non-fiction prize

A week after the new kid on the awards block was handed out, the long-list for Canada’s second richest prize for non-fiction, the $40,000 B.C. National Award for Canadian Non-fiction, has been announced.

D&M Publishers and Random House of Canada lead with three nominations apiece:

• Afflictions & Departures by Madeline Sonik (Anvil Press)

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

• Captivity: 118 Days in Iraq and the Struggle for a World Without War by James Loney (Knopf Canada)

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

• Decade of Fear: Reporting from Terrorism’s Grey Zone by Michelle Shephard (Douglas & McIntyre)

• 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)

• The Leap: How to Survive and Thrive in the Sustainable Economy by Chris Turner (Random House Canada)

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

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

The 10-title long-list was chosen from among 134 submissions by a jury comprising Paul Whitney, former city librarian at Vancouver Public Library; Patricia Graham, vice-president of digital for Pacific Newspaper Group; and author and editor Shari Graydon.

The finalists for the prize will be announced Dec. 5, with the award presentation taking place Feb. 6 in Vancouver. The winner of a third major non-fiction prize, the 2012 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-fiction, will be announced March 5.

Patrick deWitt among Writers’ Trust prizewinners

Patrick deWitt has won the 2011 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize for The Sisters Brothers (House of Anansi Press), kicking off the prize season for Canadian literary fiction and setting up a possible awards sweep for his novel about a pair of gunslingers on the trail of a California prospector.

Along with fellow B.C. author Esi Edugyan, deWitt has been nominated for all three major Canadian literary prizes, including the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction, both of which are being handed out in the coming two weeks. The literary odd couple was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, awarded earlier this month to Julian Barnes.

DeWitt said all the attention comes as a relief after his first book, Ablutions (published in the U.S. by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and in the U.K. by Granta), did not appear here. “That was sort of a heartbreaker for me, because I really wanted my work to come out here and be discussed here,” he told Q&Q, after accepting the $25,000 prize at a gala in Toronto Tuesday night. “It’s been great to be with Anansi, who have shepherded the book through all this so gracefully and with such passion. I’m elated.”

DeWitt added that he had had “a lot of trepidation” before The Sisters Brothers came out last spring: “I was concerned that the Western fans wouldn’t like it because it strayed, and that the literary fans wouldn’t like it because it was a Western, or close enough to a Western. I found the opposite to be true in both cases. It’s had a charmed life so far, and that’s a meaningful thing.”

Besides Edugyan’s novel, Half-Blood Blues (Thomas Allen Publishers), deWitt beat out a pair of short story collections, Clarke Blaise’s The Meager Tarmac (Biblioasis) and Michael Christie’s The Beggar’s Garden (HarperCollins Canada), as well as Dan Vyleta’s sophomore novel, The Quiet Twin (HarperCollins Canada).

In addition to the fiction prize, the Writers’ Trust handed out three awards, totaling $65,000, given to authors for their bodies of work. Novelist Wayne Johnston received the $25,000 Writers’ Trust Engel/Findley Award, prolific YA author Iain Lawrence took home the $20,000 Vicky Metcalf Award for Children’s Literature, and David Adams Richards, who this year published a novel (Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul) and memoir (Facing the Hunter), was given the Matt Cohen Award, which “recognizes a lifetime of distinguished work by a Canadian writer.”

The Writers’ Trust Distinguished Contribution Award, given to an individual or organization for their long-standing involvement with the organization, was given to Alma Lee, the first executive director hired by The Writers’ Union of Canada and founding artistic director of the Vancouver International Writers Festival.

Also among the night’s winners was Miranda Hill, who won the $10,000 Writers’ Trust of Canada/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize for “Petitions to Saint Chronic,” a story published by The Dalhousie Review. Hill, who lives in Hamilton, is the founder and executive director of Project Bookmark Canada, a not-for-profit organization that has erected plaques across Ontario commemorating real-life settings found in Canadian literature. She is also the wife of author Lawrence Hill, whose The Book of Negroes won the 2007 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize on its way to becoming one of the best-selling Canadian novels of all time.

Hill said that winning the Journey Prize had been a dream of sorts since she began, six years ago, avidly reading and collecting the prize anthology, which is published each year by McClelland & Stewart and includes all of the finalists. “I wanted to see what people were doing who were considered up-and-coming and promising, and I wanted to see what I could learn from that,” said Hill, whose debut collection is forthcoming from Doubleday Canada. “As I became confident and more practiced in my own writing I started thinking, ‘Someday I want to be considered a peer to these writers in this anthology.’”

Last week, the Writers’ Trust held a separate gala to hand out the inaugural Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize. Canada’s richest prize for non-fiction, worth $65,000, went to Charles Foran for Mordecai: The Life and Times.

Slideshow: Charles Foran takes home inaugural Hilary Weston Prize

A biography of iconic Montreal novelist and journalist Mordecai Richler was named the inaugural winner of the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for non-fiction. Charles Foran was awarded the $60,000 prize on Tuesday for Mordecai: The Life & Times (Knopf Canada).

Foran’s ambitious 700-page portrait of Richler also won this year’s $25,000 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-fiction, and was a finalist for the B.C. National Award for Canadian Non-fiction. It is also nominated for the 2011 Governor General’s Literary Award for non-fiction, the winner of which will be announced Nov. 15.

In accepting the award at a gala at Toronto’s Koerner Hall, Foran said he was “delighted, humbled, honoured, and greatly pleasured.”

Foran thanked award sponsor Hilary Weston for her support of Canadian literature and singled out Charles Taylor Prize founder Noreen Taylor. He also acknowledged the “three extraordinary women” who enabled his biography of a man he described as an alpha male: Louise Dennys, Foran’s editor at Knopf Canada; Richler’s widow Florence, a “provider of insight and wisdom”; and Foran’s wife, Mary.

The prize jury was comprised of writers Brian Brett, Devyani Saltzman, and Russell Wangersky. In their citation, the jury praised Foran’s biography as “an epic work of scholarship and energy” that portrays Richler’s nature “with a disarming equilibrium.”

Foran is an accomplished novelist and essayist, but Mordecai is his first biography (he has since written a short biography of Maurice Richard, published in March, for Penguin Canada’s Extraordinary Canadians series).

“I was a neophyte. I was a newcomer to this pretty complex form,” he says, adding that he suspects his novelist’s instincts gave the book narrative flow and fleshed-out characters.

Foran told Q&Q he regrets that Richler’s novels, which were taught in high schools across the country 25 years ago, are no longer nearly as popular in the curriculum. He hopes his Weston Prize win might help change that. “I would like him to be taught again,” says Foran. “I still think [Richler’s] voice, that sort of outsider voice – satiric, abrasive, not sweet, not about nature, not about memory … this large, slightly intimidating voice is important. To have him back on the curriculum would be to remind young Canadians that we have a lot of different voices in this country.”

For her part, Weston emphasized the prize’s mandate to “promote factual writing to young readers” by distributing an educational supplement to Canadian schools.

The four other Weston Prize finalists are Charlotte Gill’s Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe (Greystone Books); Richard Gwyn’s Nation Maker: Sir John A. Macdonald: His Life, Our Times; Volume Two: 1867–1891 (Random House Canada); Grant Lawrence’s Adventures in Solitude: What Not to Wear to a Nude Potluck and Other Stories from Desolation Sound (Harbour Publishing); and Ray Robertson’s Why Not? Fifteen Reasons to Live (Biblioasis). Each finalist received $5,000.

Jack Hodgins, Kristi Bridgeman win Victoria Book Prize

The Victoria Book Prize Society announced author Jack Hodgins and illustrator Kristi Bridgeman as the winners of the 2011 Victoria Book Prize Awards at a gala on Wednesday evening.

Victoria mayor Dean Fortin and Brian H. Butler presented Hodgins with the $5,000 City of Victoria Butler Book Prize for his novel The Master of Happy Endings (Thomas Allen Publishers), deemed “the best book published in the preceding year in the categories of fiction, literary non-fiction, and poetry.”

In its decision, the jury – writer Theresa Kishkan, bookseller Cathy Sorensen, and librarian Avi Silberstein – applauded The Master of Happy Endings as “an exuberant novel about the power of narrative to serve as a compass for human odysseys” and praised Hodgins’ “literary skill in service to his rich imagination.”

Samantha Holmes, owner and general manager of Bolen Books, presented Bridgeman with the $5,000 Bolen Books Children’s Book Prize for her illustrated work in Uirapurú (Oolichan Books), with text by P.K. Page. The jury – librarian Tracy Kendrick, writer Barbara Nickel, and bookseller Pat Oldroyd – describes Bridgeman’s illustrations as “so richly layered and complex, so warm with colour, humour, and detail.”

Carla Funk, Stephen Hume, Sylvia Olsen, and John Schreiber were also nominated for the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize; Sarah N. Harvey and Arthur John Stewart were finalists for the Bolen Books Children’s Book Prize.

Edugyan, deWitt complete awards trifecta with GG nods

Two Canadian novelists few people had heard of before this summer continue rack up acclaim from international prize juries.

Esi Edugyan and Patrick deWitt – authors of the novels Half-Blood Blues and The Sisters Brothers, respectively – have been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction, completing a double trifecta that includes the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Both B.C.-born authors are also finalists for the prestigious Man Booker Prize.

The shortlist is rounded by another Giller finalist, David Bezmozgis’s The Free World, as well as a first novel, Alexi Zentner’s Touch, and Marina Endicott’s The Little Shadows.

One of the season’s most highly touted novels, Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table (McClelland & Stewart), was not submitted for consideration for the prize. Ondaatje, who is shortlisted for the $50,000 Giller, has won the GG for fiction three times before: in 1992 for The English Patient, in 2000 for Anil’s Ghost, and in 2007 for Divisadero.

Also notable are the poetry finalists, three of whom are published by Toronto micro-press BookThug.

The complete shortlists, which include drama, non-fiction, children’s books, and translation, are as follows:

Fiction

• David Bezmozgis, The Free World (HarperCollins Canada)
• Patrick deWitt, The Sisters Brothers (House of Anansi Press)
• Esi Edugyan, Half-Blood Blues (Thomas Allen Publishers)
• Marina Endicott, The Little Shadows (Doubleday Canada)
• Alexi Zentner, Touch (Knopf Canada)

Poetry

• Michael Boughn, Cosmographia: A Post-Lucretian Faux Micro-Epic (BookThug)
• Kate Eichhorn, Fieldnotes, A Forensic (BookThug)
• Phil Hall, Killdeer (BookThug)
• Garry Thomas Morse, Discovery Passages (Talonbooks)
• Susan Musgrave, Origami Dove (McClelland & Stewart)

Drama

• Brendan Gall, Minor Complications: Two Plays (Coach House Books)
• Jonathan Garfinkel, House of Many Tongues (Playwrights Canada Press)
• Erin Shields, If We Were Birds (Playwrights Canada Press)
• Donna-Michelle St. Bernard, Gas Girls (Playwrights Canada Press)
• Vern Thiessen, Lenin’s Embalmers (Playwrights Canada Press)

Non-fiction

• Charles Foran, Mordecai: The Life & Times (Knopf Canada)
• Nathan M. Greenfield, The Damned: The Canadians at the Battle of Hong Kong and the POW Experience, 1941-45 (HarperCollins Canada)
• Richard Gwyn, Nation Maker: Sir John A. Macdonald: His Life, Our Times, Volume Two: 1867-1891 (Random House Canada)
• J.J. Lee, The Measure of a Man: The Story of a Father, a Son, and a Suit (McClelland & Stewart)
• Andrew Nikiforuk, Empire of the Beetle: How Human Folly and a Tiny Bug Are Killing North America’s Great Forests (Greystone Books)

Children’s Literature: Text

• Jan L. Coates, A Hare in the Elephant’s Trunk (Red Deer Press)
• Deborah Ellis, No Ordinary Day (Groundwood Books)
• Christopher Moore, From Then to Now: A Short History of the World (Tundra Books)
• Kenneth Oppel, This Dark Endeavour (HarperCollins Canada)
• Tim Wynne-Jones, Blink & Caution (Candlewick Press)

Children’s Literature: Illustration

• Isabelle Arsenault, Migrant; text by Maxine Trottier (Groundwood Books)
• Kim La Fave, Fishing with Gubby; text by Gary Kent (Harbour Publishing)
• Renata Liwska, Red Wagon; text by Renata Liwska (Philomel Books/Penguin)
• Frank Viva, Along a Long Road; text by Frank Viva (HarperCollins Canada)
• Cybèle Young, Ten Birds; text by Cybèle Young (Kids Can Press)

Translation: French to English

• Judith Cowan, Meridian Line (Signal Editions); English translation of Origine des méridiens by Paul Bélanger (Éditions du Noroît)
• David Scott Hamilton, Exit (Anvil Press); English translation of Paradis, clef en main by Nelly Arcan (Les Éditions Les 400 coups)
• Lazer Lederhendler, Apocalypse for Beginners (Vintage Canada); English translation of Tarmac by Nicolas Dickner (Éditions Alto)
• Lazer Lederhendler, Dirty Feet (House of Anansi Press); English translation of Les pieds sales by Edem Awumey (Les Éditions du Boréal)
• Donald Winkler, Partita for Glenn Gould (McGill-Queen’s University Press); English translation of Partita pour Glenn Gould by Georges Leroux (Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal)

Tranströmer wins Nobel Prize

In a year that saw literary punters make Bob Dylan the odds-on favourite (and in which Canadian readers continued to carry the torch for their own, be it Alice or Margaret), the 2011 Nobel Prize for Literature, announced in Stockholm this morning, was awarded to 80-year-old Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, a towering figure in Scandinavian literature.

Tranströmer, long considered a contender for the $1.5 million (U.S.) prize, won “because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality,” the Swedish Academy says in its citation.

Tranströmer’s main English-language translator is Scottish poet Robin Fulton, whose The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems was published by New Directions in 2006. The collection includes poems Tranströmer wrote after suffering a stroke that had left him unable to speak.

In 2007, Tranströmer received a lifetime recognition award from the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry.

Erin Bow’s Plain Kate wins TD Canadian Children’s Literature Award

Erin Bow has won this year’s TD Canadian Children’s Literature Award for her historical fantasy YA novel Plain Kate, published by Scholastic Canada.

Bow received her $25,000 prize at a gala event in Toronto last night. The Canadian Children’s Book Centre also announced winners of the following awards:

Marilyn Baillie Picture Book Award ($20,000)
I Know Here by Laurel Croza; Matt James, illus., Groundwood Books

Norma Fleck Award for Canadian Children’s Non-fiction ($10,000)
Case Closed? Nine Mysteries Unlocked by Modern Science by Susan Hughes; Michael Wandelmaier, illus., Kids Can Press

Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction for Young People ($5,000)
The Glory Wind by Valerie Sherrard, Fitzhenry & Whiteside

John Spray Mystery Award ($5,000)
A Spy in the House by Y.S. Lee, Candlewick Press/Random House of Canada

The CCBC also introduced the Monica Hughes Award, which will honour excellence in the children’s science fiction and fantasy genre. The inaugural $5,000 cash prize will be awarded annually, starting October 2012. To be eligible, the book must be an original work in English, aimed at readers ages eight to 16.

Edugyan, deWitt among fresh faces on Giller shortlist

In introducing the jury for the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize, founder Jack Rabinovitch told a crowd of media and publishing professionals assembled in Toronto that this year’s crop of nominees “dignifies world literature, not only Canadian literature.”

Indeed, the jurors for this year’s prize seemed to find common ground with their counterparts at the Man Booker Prize and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize in nominating Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers (House of Anansi Press) and Esi Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues (Thomas Allen Publishers), a pair of novels cosmopolitan in spirit. Both writers are from the West Coast and have seemingly come out of nowhere to earn international acclaim for their sophomore novels about, respectively, the California gold rush and a jazz musician who disappears in Nazi-occupied Paris.

Most of this year’s finalists are relative newcomers: critical darling David Bezmozgis is nominated for his first novel, The Free World (HarperCollins Canada), Lynn Coady gets the nod for her fourth novel, The Antagonist (Anansi), and short story writer Zsuzsi Gartner has been singled out for her collection Better Living Through Plastic Explosives (Hamish Hamilton Canada).

For the first time since 2004, the shortlist includes six titles. It is rounded out by a heavy favourite: The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje, who has twice been shortlisted for the prize and was a co-winner in 2000 for Anil’s Ghost (M&S). Absent from the list are other former finalists Wayne Johnston, Guy Vanderhaeghe, and Marina Endicott.

This year’s jury comprises former finalist Annabel Lyon, American author Howard Norman, and Scottish playwright and novelist Andrew O’Hagan. The winner will be announced Nov. 8 at a Toronto gala, which will be broadcast live on CBC’s Bold TV and live-streamed on the CBC Books website.