Brown, Solie among Trillium winners

The 23rd annual Trillium Book Awards have just been handed out at a luncheon in Toronto. We’ll have more coverage later, but for now, here are the winners:

English-language book award: Ian Brown, The Boy in the Moon (Random House Canada)

French-language book award: Ryad Assani-Razaki, Deux cercles (VLB éditeur)

English-language poetry award: Karen Solie, Pigeon (House of Anansi Press)

French-language poetry award: Michèle Matteau, Passerelles (Les Éditions L’Interligne)

Event photos: K.V. Johansen in Macedonia, Ian McEwan in Toronto, and Watch This Space at the Wychwood Barns

Canadian YA fantasy writer K.V. Johansen was recently a guest of the 22nd International Book Fair held in Skopje, Macedonia. Over a period of three days, beginning April 12, Johansen launched the Macedonian translation of her 2007 novel Torrie and the Snake-Prince (Annick Press), received the Anna Frank Literary Award, participated in a panel discussion on fantasy literature in Canada and Macedonia as part of a Day of Canadian Culture organized by the Canadian Embassy in Belgrade, and addressed a literature class at a Skopje university that had been studying one of her short stories. Above: Johansen at the University American College Skopje. (Photo by Chris Paul)

“Quick: name four things you know about Canada!” On April 18, Ian McEwan (left) was interviewed onstage by author and broadcaster Ian Brown at the Toronto Public Library’s Appel Salon. McEwan got stranded in Toronto for a few days, thanks to Iceland’s volcano, and may even use the experience as the narrative hook in a new novel. Too bad the title Mostly Harmless is already taken. (Photo by Dona Acheson/Courtesy of the TPL)

On April 25, the Small Print series hosted the launch of Marc Ngui and Hadley Dyer’s Watch this Space: Designing, Defending and Sharing Public Spaces (Kids Can Press). The event – which, though kid-friendly, had the potential Google minefield title of “Doing It In Public” – was held at Toronto’s Wychwood Barns, and featured a chalk-drawing contest as well as a panel discussion featuring Dyer and Ngui, along with city trustee Josh Matlow, city councillor Joe Mihevc, and Spacing magazine’s Matthew Blackett. Above: Small Print’s Chris Reed introduces the panel. (Photo courtesy of Kids Can Press)

Charles Taylor Prize nominees discuss the writing process

On Friday night, Bravo! hosted the four Charles Taylor Prize for Non-Fiction nominees at the Masonic Temple (also known as MTV studios) in Toronto. Here’s what each of the authors had to say about their books:

Daniel Poliquin, René Lévesque: “I had just been nominated for the Giller Prize two years ago, and I felt unemployed, because all the hoopla was over and now I had this new challenge to work on a new book from scratch, and it was simply exhilarating. I had to first write it in French, and then I thought I would translate myself, but I found that too boring. So I said, I’m going to write it in English, and that’s what I did. So I’ve become, in the process, a bilingual writer – although the editors at Penguin will tell you I have a huge problem with prepositions.”

Kenneth Whyte, The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst: “Hearst has been completely overwritten, over-analyzed, and psychoanalyzed. A couple of the biographers actually hired psychoanalysts to help them with the character. I wanted to get to him fresh, and I wanted to get to him through his work. He spent his life working hard, and I thought that would be the most effective way to get at who he was. So I spent a lot of time with his newspapers, the stuff he actually produced on a day-to-day basis.”

Ian Brown, The Boy in the Moon: A Father’s Search for His Disabled Son: “The book is really an attempt to come to terms with what [my son, Walker] has, our search to find out what it was, how to deal with it, how to keep him alive. But more importantly, what his life was worth. It’s such a difficult life, for him especially, but also for everybody around him, and we tried to figure out what the value of his life was, what his inner life was like, whether I could somehow find his voice.”

John English, Just Watch Me: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, 1968–2000: “We’re all biographers, and I think we’re all asking the same question: what was the inner life of this individual? In the case of Pierre Trudeau, he so deliberately seemed to try to conceal it. He had such an obsession with privacy, as anyone who reported on him at the time will know. And yet, what was curious for me was that he kept these papers that were so revealing, in terms of his own past, his feelings, his passions.”

The full discussion will be aired on Bravo!’s Arts & Minds on Jan. 30 at 7 a.m. and 6 p.m. and on Jan. 31 at 7 p.m. The award itself, which comes with a $25,000 prize, will be given out on Feb. 8.

Kerouacapalooza at the Gladstone Hotel

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Jack Kerouac’s seminal On The Road – as well as launch a pair of Kerouac-themed books – Toronto’s This Is Not a Reading Series held a “Kerouac Legacy Party” at the Gladstone Hotel on Sept. 5.

Ian Brown inspects author Ray Robertson’s muttonchops. Robertson was launching his new novel, What Happened Later (Thomas Allen Publishers).

Publicist Debby de Groot fears losing her soul in the camera’s flash. Author Stephen Finucan, on the other hand, appears to welcome it.

David Creighton (right), who was launching his book Ecstasy of the Beats (Dundurn Press), makes a point as Robertson and host Jian Ghomeshi listen.

Dundurn design and production assistant Erin Mallory, owner Kirk Howard, and new sales and marketing director Margaret Bryant.

House of Anansi’s Laura Repas with her copy of Robertson’s book.

Local chef Sacha Gatien Douglas hoists one for Kerouac with Catherine MacGregor of HarperCollins Canada.

Novelist Michael Helm and his wife, Juanita Des Barros. (Note designer Bill Douglas going postal in the background.)

Poets Ken Babstock and Karen Solie.

Ghomeshi gets cozy with Thomas Allen publisher Patrick Crean and publicity manager Lisa Zaritzky.

Robertson in a publicity sandwich between Thomas Allen’s Laura Palumbo and Larissa Chalmers. (Warning: staring directly at the pattern on Robertson’s shirt may cause dizziness and/or nausea – though it seems to have had a calming effect on Bill Douglas…)

Alicia Hogan, Thomas Allen senior editor Janice Zawerbny, the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Shirley Hudson, and author Paul Quarrington.

Canadian readers: a little busier, a little nicer

Ian Brown has a distinctly Canadian take on all the hand wringing over the recent National Endowment for the Arts report on the declining readership for literary fiction, plays, and poetry in the U.S. While pointing out that the most recent StatsCan survey showed that Canadians read more than their American counterparts, Brown’s Globe and Mail column basically follows a line set down by Charles McGrath in a recent New York Times op-ed piece, in which McGrath argues that just because people are reading less “literary” material it doesn’t follow that they are reading less. Brown takes particular exception to the NEA’s narrow definition of literary reading: “By excluding blogs, biographies, browsing, literary journalism and so many other ways people read these days, the NEA survey becomes little more than a eulogy, a backward glance at long-established ‘literary’ habits, rather than an account of genuine new ones.”

Related links:
Ian Brown’s column on the NEA report