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Reviews, Awards, and Interviews: CASE STUDY, ORDINARY WONDER TALES, CONFESSIONS WITH KEITH, and more!

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IN THE NEWS!

CASE STUDY

Case Study by Graeme Macrae Burnet (November 1, 2022) has been reviewed by Christian Lorentzen in the New York Times! The review was published online on November 1, 2022. Read the full NYT review here.

Lorentzen writes,

“Case Study has a lot in common with the novels of Vladimir Nabokov and Roberto Bolaño, in which invented characters pass through tumultuous episodes of literary history that never quite happened, though it seems as if they should have. … Case Study is a diverting novel, overflowing with clever plays on and inversions of tropes of English intellectual and social life during the postwar decades.”

Case Study has been featured on Lit Hub as one of “18 new books to kick your November reading into gear.” The list was posted on November 1, 2022 and can be read here.

Case Study was reviewed by Jessica Brockmole for The Historical Novel Society. The review was published online on November 1, 2022. Read the full review here.

Brockmole writes,

“Case Study is a dizzying dive into British counterculture of the 1960s and the radical anti-psychiatry movement … wildly inventive and slickly written. The notebooks feel so casually and authentically from the period, with ‘Rebecca’s’ word choices and the details she includes saying as much about 1960s British society as they do about her place in it. ‘Rebecca’ is deliciously unreliable as a narrator.”

Graeme Macrae Burnet has been interviewed by Lily Meyer for Crime Reads. The interview was posted online on November 3, 2022 an can be read here.

Meyer writes,

“Burnet propels readers through the novel with his fierce, hilarious intelligence.”

Case Study has also been excerpted in Lit Hub and featured by Vol 1. Brooklyn as part of their “November 2022 Book Preview.” The excerpt, and preview were published online on November 3, 2022. Read the Lit Hub here, and Vol 1. Brooklyn here.

Grab your copy of Case Study here!

ORDINARY WONDER TALES

Emily Urquhart, author of Ordinary Wonder Tales (November 1, 2022), was interviewed by Lisa Godfrey on CBC Ideas! The episode on hauntings aired on October 25, 2022. Emily’s segment begins at 25:00 mins. Listen to the full episode here.

Ordinary Wonder Tales has been reviewed by Kathleen Rooney in LIBER: A Feminist Review. The review will be published in print in their Winter 2022 issue. Read the full review here.

Kathleen writes,

“In Ordinary Wonder Tales, Urquhart stylishly combines her personal experiences with her academic expertise, leading to a reading experience that feels entertaining and casual yet also edifying … It’s a testament to Urquhart’s own formidable storytelling skill that each of her essays inspires a quiet awe.”

Ordinary Wonder Tales was been listed in CBC Books and Toronto Life!

The CBC Books list, “20 Canadian books we can’t wait to read in November” was published on November 2, 2022. You can check it out here.

The Toronto Life list, “Sixteen things to see, do, read and hear in Toronto this November” was published on October 28, 2022. You can read the full list here.

Order your copy of Ordinary Wonder Tales here!

THE AFFIRMATIONS

Luke Hathaway‘s poem “As the part hanteth after the water brooks” from The Affirmations (April 5, 2022), won the Confederation Poets Prize by Arc Poetry. The prize winner was announced on October 27, 2022. You can read the full announcement here.

This year’s judge, Brecken Hancock, had this to say about the winning poem:

“In 12 incredibly short lines, Luke Hathaway has captured how we survive and thrive by chance, by lucky accident. These spare lines take the reader on a profound journey with the speaker who has gone “uphill to the well / where I went, as I thought // for my water” only to find an utterly new form of thirst and its remedy waiting there instead. A previously unrecognized, but life-threatening, form of dehydration is alleviated (in what feels like the nick of time) by the startling discovery of a source to quench it. Rather than dwell on what had previously been missing, a sorrowful lack, the poem ends in affirmation—communicating a resonant relief, and, beyond that, the joy and ecstasy that can finally be embodied and expressed when our deepest needs are recognized and met.”

Get your copy of The Affirmations here!

CONFESSIONS WITH KEITH

Confessions with Keith by Pauline Holdstock (October 25, 2022), has been reviewed at Focus on Victoria on October 31, 2022. Read the whole review here.

Reviewer Amy Reiswig writes,

“Confessions with Keith reminds us that life is a raw, radiant, and ridiculous story unfolding moment by moment for everyone in their separate subjectivities. It deserves laughter. It deserves tears. It is made more bearable by books like this, the literary equivalent of uncensored midnight conversation over cups of tea or glasses—plural—of wine. What Vita observes of festival street performers could well be said of reading Holdstock’s newest creation: ‘It was a shared experience of human life, a little bit of eternity together.'”

Confessions With Keith has also been reviewed at the BC Review. Read the whole review here.

Reviewer Candace Fertile writes,

“Things going wrong on many levels is the focus of the novel, but Vita’s ability to plough through the problems and often see the humour even when exhausted is refreshing … Confessions with Keith deals with real life issues in a frenetic and funny manner.”

Get your copy of Confessions with Keith here!

THIS TIME, THAT PLACE

This Time, That Place: Selected Stories by Clark Blaise (October 18, 2022) has been excerpted at Open Book. The excerpt is from the story “Translation” and was published Nov 1, 2022. You can read it here.

This Time, That Place also received a starred review at Quill & Quire. The review was published on November 2, 2022. Check out the whole review here.

Reviewer Steven W. Beattie writes,

“Blaise is … almost preternaturally adept at noticing things … sublime technique and linguistic finesse [are] showcased in these inestimable short works.”

Pick up your copy of This Time, That Place here!

TRY NOT TO BE STRANGE

Michael Hingston, author of Try Not to Be Strange: The Curious History of the Kingdom of Redonda (September 13, 2022), has been reviewed by MA Orthofer in The Complete Review. The article was published on October 30, 2022. You can read the full review here.

Orthofer writes,

“Try Not to be Strange is an enjoyable account of a bizarre not-quite-real place, with a rich cast of characters—not least Hingston himself, who amusingly tracks his own obsessiveness.”

Michael Hingston has also been interviewed on Across the Pond podcast and New & Used podcast! Both episodes were published on November 1, 2022. You can listen to Across the Pond here, and New & Used here.

Get your copy of Try Not to Be Strange here!

CASE STUDY longlisted for the HWA Crown Awards!

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We’re excited to share that Case Study by Graeme Macrae Burnet (November 1, 2022) has been longlisted for the 2022 Historical Writers’ Association Golden Crown Award! The longlist was announced on September 28, 2022. Check out the official announcement, and full longlist here.

The HWA Golden Crown Awards celebrate the best historical writing, fiction and non-fiction, published in the UK and its ability to engage, illuminate, entertain and inform legions of readers.

The shortlist will be announced October 25, 2022, and winners announcement and awards ceremony will be on November 23, 2022.

Grab your copy of Case Study here!

ABOUT CASE STUDY

Shortlisted for the 2022 Gordon Burn Prize • Shortlisted for the 2022 Ned Kelly Awards • Longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize • Longlisted for the 2022 HWA Gold Crown Award

The Booker-shortlisted author of His Bloody Project blurs the lines between patient and therapist, fiction and documentation, and reality and dark imagination. 

London, 1965. ‘I have decided to write down everything that happens, because I feel, I suppose, I may be putting myself in danger,’ writes an anonymous patient, a young woman investigating her sister’s suicide. In the guise of a dynamic and troubled alter-ego named Rebecca Smyth, she makes an appointment with the notorious and roughly charismatic psychotherapist Collins Braithwaite, whom she believes is responsible for her sister’s death. But in this world of beguilement and bamboozlement, neither she nor we can be certain of anything.

Case Study is a novel as slippery as it is riveting, as playful as it is sinister, a meditation on truth, sanity, and the instability of identity by one of the most inventive novelists of our time.

ABOUT GRAEME MACRAE BURNET

Graeme Macrae Burnet is among Scotland’s leading contemporary novelists. Best known for his dazzling Booker-shortlisted second novel, His Bloody Project (2015), he is also the author of two Simenon-influenced novels: The Disappearance of Adele Bedeau (2014) and The Accident on the A35 (2017). Burnet has appeared at literary festivals in Australia, the USA, Germany, India, Russia, Spain, France, Korea, Denmark and Estonia. His novels have been translated into more than twenty languages and achieved bestseller status in several countries. He lives and works in Glasgow.

 

MUSIC, LATE AND SOON shortlisted for the 2022 J.I. Segal Awards Best Quebec Book on a Jewish Theme!

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coverWe’re thrilled to share that Music, Late and Soon by Robyn Sarah (August 24, 2022) has been shortlisted for the 2022 J.I. Segal Awards Best Quebec Book on a Jewish Theme! The shortlist was announced on September 21, 2022. Check out the full list here.

“We are thrilled to be able to include five outstanding titles by well-known writers in our short-list,” said Université de Montréal Professor and Awards Committee Chair Robert Schwartzwald in response to the jury’s announcement. “With books in both English and French and from a variety of genres, there is much to celebrate as we prepare to reward the best Quebec Book on a Jewish Theme!”

For over half a century, the Jacob Isaac Segal Awards have been an important community recognition of Jewish-based literature. Since 2020, the Best Quebec Book on a Jewish Theme award also honours the contribution of Jewish culture to a richly diverse contemporary Quebec.

The 2022 J.I. Segal Award for the Best Quebec Book on a Jewish Theme is accompanied by a $5,000 cash prize. The winner will be announced on November 10th, 2022.

Grab your copy of Music, Late and Soon here!

ABOUT MUSIC, LATE AND SOON

Shortlisted for the J.I Segal Awards Best Quebec Book on a Jewish Theme • Shortlisted for the The Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-Fiction

A poet rediscovers the artistic passion of her youth—and pays tribute to the teacher she thought she’d lost.

After thirty-five years as an “on-again, off-again, uncoached closet pianist,” poet and writer Robyn Sarah picked up the phone one day and called her old piano teacher, whom she had last seen in her early twenties. Music, Late and Soon is the story of her return to studying piano with the mentor of her youth. In tandem, she reflects on a previously unexamined musical past: a decade spent at Quebec’s Conservatoire de Musique, studying clarinet—ostensibly headed for a career as an orchestral musician, but already a writer at heart. A meditation on creative process in both music and literary art, this two-tiered musical autobiography interweaves past and present as it tracks the author’s long-ago defection from a musical career path and her late re-embrace of serious practice. At its core is a portrait of an extraordinary piano teacher and of a relationship remembered and renewed.

Credit: Stephen Brockwell

ABOUT ROBYN SARAH

Robyn Sarah is the author of eleven collections of poems, two collections of short stories, a book of essays on poetry, and a memoir, Music, Late and Soon. Her tenth poetry collection, My Shoes Are Killing Me, won the Governor General’s Award in 2015. In 2017 Biblioasis published a forty-year retrospective, Wherever We Mean to Be: Selected Poems, 1975-2015. Sarah’s poems have been anthologized in The Norton Anthology of Poetry and have been broadcast by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac. From 2011 until 2020 she served as poetry editor for Cormorant Books. She has lived for most of her life in Montréal.

QUERELLE OF ROBERVAL shortlisted for the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize!

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We’re thrilled to share that Querelle of Roberval by Kevin Lambert, translated by Donald Winkler (August 2, 2022) is a finalist for the 2022 Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Prize for Fiction!

The shortlist was announced at 10AM ET on September 14, 2022. You can read the full shortlist here.

The judges’ citation states: “Kevin Lambert’s fearless novel is a profane, funny, bleak, touching, playful, and outrageous satire of sexual politics, labour, and capitalism. In ecstatic and cutting prose, it gleefully illuminates both the broad socio-political tensions of life in a Quebec company town and the intimate details of sex, lust, loneliness, and gay relationships in such a place. Like its central character, the book is brash, beautiful, quasi-mythic, and tragic. Most improbably, for all its daring and provocation, Querelle of Roberval is lyrically, even tenderly written.”

Publisher Dan Wells said this about the shortlisting: “I am so pleased for Kevin, and for Don Winkler, Querelle‘s exceptional translator, and grateful to the Writers’ Trust jury for understanding that the novel’s various discomforts, savage as some of them may be, are always perfectly aligned to the book’s spirit and purpose. This is classic tragedy with a twist, and I’m thrilled that this nomination will help us bring Kevin’s and Don’s work to a wider range of readers than might otherwise have been the case.”

Named in honour of Writers’ Trust co-founders and literary couple Margaret Atwood and Graeme Gibson, who started the organization in 1976 with the help of a few fellow writers and an aim to encourage a Canadian literary culture at home, the Atwood Gibson Prize recognizes writers of exceptional talent for the best novel or short story collection of the year.

The finalists are selected by a three-member, independent judging panel and the $60,000 winner is announced at the annual Writers’ Trust Awards. The award is generously funded by Canadian businessman and philanthropist Jim Balsillie.

Grab your copy of Querelle of Roberval here!

ABOUT QUERELLE OF ROBERVAL

Shortlisted for the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize

Homage to Jean Genet’s antihero and a brilliant reimagining of the ancient form of tragedy, Querelle of Roberval, winner of the Marquis de Sade Prize, is a wildly imaginative story of justice, passion, and murderous revenge.

Credit: Gregory Augendre-Cambron

As a millworkers’ strike in the northern lumber town of Roberval drags on, tensions start to escalate between the workers—but when a lockout renews their solidarity, they rally around the mysterious and magnetic influence of Querelle, a dashing newcomer from Montreal. Strapping and unabashed, likeable but callow, by day he walks the picket lines and at night moves like a mythic Adonis through the ranks of young men who flock to his apartment for sex. As the dispute hardens and both sides refuse to yield, sand stalls the gears of the economic machine and the tinderbox of class struggle and entitlement ignites in a firestorm of passions carnal and violent. Trenchant social drama, a tribute to Jean Genet’s antihero, and a brilliant reimagining of the ancient form of tragedy, Querelle of Roberval, winner of France’s Marquis de Sade Prize, is a wildly imaginative story of justice, passion, and murderous revenge.

ABOUT KEVIN LAMBERT

Born in 1992, Kevin Lambert grew up in Chicoutimi, Quebec. He earned a master’s degree in creative writing at the Université de Montréal. His widely acclaimed first novel, You Will Love What You Have Killed, was a finalist for Quebec’s Booksellers’ Prize. His second novel, Querelle of Roberval, won France’s Marquis de Sade Prize, and was a finalist for the prestigious Prix Médicis and the literary prize of the Paris newspaper Le Monde. In Canada, Querelle of Roberval won the Prix Ringuet of the Quebec Academy of Arts and Letters, was a finalist for the Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal and won or was a finalist for six other literary prizes. Kevin Lambert lives in Montreal.

ABOUT DONALD WINKLER

Donald Winkler is a translator of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. He is a three-time winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for French-to-English translation. He lives in Montreal.

ON TIME AND WATER longlisted for the NATIONAL TRANSLATION AWARD!

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On Time and Water coverWe’re thrilled to share that On Time and Water (March 30, 2021) by Andri Snær Magnason, translated from the Icelandic by Lytton Smith, was longlisted for the 2022 National Translation Award! Check out the full list of nominees here.

The NTA, which is administered by ALTA, is the only national award for translated fiction, poetry, and literary nonfiction that includes a rigorous examination of both the source text and its relation to the finished English work. Featuring authors writing in 14 different languages, this year’s longlists expand the prize’s dedication to literary diversity in English. The selection criteria include the quality of the finished English language book, and the quality of the translation. This year’s prose judges are Suzanne Jill Levine, Arunava Sinha, and Annie Tucker.

The winning translators will receive a $2,500 cash prize each. The awards will be announced at ALTA’s annual awards ceremony, which in 2022 will be held virtually. The awards ceremony will air on October 6, 2022 on ALTA’s Eventbrite page; this event is free and open to the public.

Order your copy of On Time and Water here!

ABOUT ON TIME AND WATER

Finalist for the 2021 Nordic Council Literature Prize • A Winnipeg Free Press Top Read of 2021

Asked by a leading climate scientist why he wasn’t writing about the greatest crisis mankind has faced, Andri Snær Magnason, one of Iceland’s most beloved writers and public intellectuals, protested: he wasn’t a specialist, he said. It wasn’t his field. But the scientist persisted: “If you cannot understand our scientific findings and present them in an emotional, psychological, poetic or mythological context,” he told him, “then no one will really understand the issue, and the world will end.”

Based on interviews and advice from leading glacial, ocean, climate, and geographical scientists, and interwoven with personal, historical, and mythological stories, Magnason’s resulting response is a rich and compelling work of narrative nonfiction that illustrates the reality of climate change and offers hope in the face of an uncertain future. Moving from reflections on how one writes an obituary for a glacier to exhortation for a heightened understanding of human time and our obligations to one another, throughout history and across the globe, On Time and Water is both deeply personal and globally minded: a travel story, a world history, a desperate plea to live in harmony with future generations—and is unlike anything that has yet been published on the current climate emergency.

ABOUT ANDRI SNÆR MAGNASON

Andri Snær Magnason is one of Iceland’s most celebrated writers. He has won the Icelandic Literary Prize for fiction, children’s fiction, and non-fiction. In 2009, Magnason co-directed the documentary Dreamland, which was based on his book Dreamland: A Self-Help Manual for a Frightened Nation. In 2010, Magnason was awarded the Kairos Prize, presented to outstanding individuals in the field of intercultural understanding. Magnason ran for president of Iceland in 2016 and came third out of nine candidates.

ABOUT LYTTON SMITH

Lytton Smith is a poet, professor, and translator from the Icelandic. His most recent translations include works by Kristin Ómarsdóttir, Jón Gnarr, Ófeigur Sigurðsson, and Guðbergur Bergsson. His most recent poetry collection, The All-Purpose Magical Tent, was published by Nightboat. Having earned his MFA and PhD from Columbia University, he currently teaches at SUNY Geneseo.

ON PROPERTY nominated for the HERITAGE TORONTO BOOK AWARD!

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Book cover for Rinaldo Walcott's On Property. Features the author's name and title at the top with "Field Notes" written on the side vertically. Overlapping the title is a security camera.We’re excited to share that Rinaldo Walcott’s On Property (February 2, 2021) has been nominated for the 2022 Heritage Toronto Book Award! Check out the full list of nominees here.

Since 1974, the Heritage Toronto Awards have celebrated individuals, organizations, and the projects they create. The annual ceremony brings together these extraordinary nominees and city influencers from across its culture, development, and policy-making communities. The Heritage Toronto Book Award aims to highlight the breadth and depth of the Greater Toronto Area’s heritage, covering topics from medical discoveries, to sports history to Indigenous reconciliation. The book jury assesses nominees based on the criteria of advocacy, scholarship, education, and production value.

The winner will be announced at the 47th Annual Heritage Toronto Awards event, which will be held on Monday, October 17th at The Carlu (444 Yonge Street) beginning at 5:30PM ET.

Tickets for the gala are available to purchase here.

Get your copy of On Property here!

 

Photo Credit: Abdi Osman

ABOUT ON PROPERTY

From plantation rebellion to prison labour’s super-exploitation, Walcott examines the relationship between policing and property.

That a man can lose his life for passing a fake $20 bill when we know our economies are flush with fake money says something damning about the way we’ve organized society. Yet the intensity of the calls to abolish the police after George Floyd’s death surprised almost everyone. What, exactly, does abolition mean? How did we get here? And what does property have to do with it? In On Property, Rinaldo Walcott explores the long shadow cast by slavery’s afterlife and shows how present-day abolitionists continue the work of their forebears in service of an imaginative, creative philosophy that ensures freedom and equality for all. Thoughtful, wide-ranging, compassionate, and profound, On Property makes an urgent plea for a new ethics of care.

ABOUT RINALDO WALCOTT

Rinaldo Walcott is a Professor in the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. His research is in the area of Black Diaspora Cultural Studies, gender and sexuality.

CASE STUDY longlisted for the BOOKER PRIZE!

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We’re excited to share that Case Study by Graeme Macrae Burnet (November 1, 2022) has been longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize! Check out the full longlist here.

The 2022 Booker judges on Case Study: “A mystery story—or is it?—that takes us into the heart of the psychoanalytical consulting room. Or does it? Interleaving a biography of radical ‘60s ‘untherapist’ Collins Braithwaite with the notebooks of his patient ‘Rebecca’, a young woman seeking answers about the death of her sister, ‘GMB’ presents a forensic, elusive and mordantly funny text(s) layered with questions about authenticity and the self.”

“We’re delighted to be the North American publishers of Graeme Macrae Burnet’s Case Study, a fabulously playful novel of psychological intrigue that kept us guessing from the first pages through to the last,” says Dan Wells, owner and publisher of Biblioasis. “A joyful puzzle of a book, brilliant and funny, it’s no surprise to us that it has made the Booker longlist: our congratulations go out to Graeme, and we look forward to introducing readers to the world of Collins Braithwaite and Rebecca Smyth (or whoever she may in fact be).”

Case Study is Macrae Burnet’s second book to be recognized by the Booker Prize. His novel His Bloody Project was shortlisted in 2015. This is also Biblioasis’ second book that has made the Booker longlist in the past four years, the first being Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann in 2019.

Case Study was published in the UK in 2021, and has received wide acclaim since its release. The novel was longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize and shortlisted for the Ned Kelly International Crime Prize.

Biblioasis is a literary press based in Windsor, Ontario. Since 2004 we have published the best in contemporary fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and literature in translation. For more information please visit our website, biblioasis.com

The Booker Prize was first awarded in 1969. Its aim was to stimulate the reading and discussion of contemporary fiction. The shortlist will be announced on September 6, 2022, and the winner will be announced on October 17, 2022. Congratulations and best of luck to Graeme!

Preorder your copy of Case Study here!

ABOUT CASE STUDY

Longlisted for the 2022 Gordon Burn Prize • Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2022

The Booker-shortlisted author of His Bloody Project blurs the lines between patient and therapist, fiction and documentation, and reality and dark imagination. 

London, 1965. An unworldly young woman believes that a charismatic psychotherapist, Collins Braithwaite, has driven her sister to suicide. Intent on confirming her suspicions, she assumes a false identity and presents herself to him as a client, recording her experiences in a series of notebooks. But she soon finds herself drawn into a world in which she can no longer be certain of anything. Even her own character.

In Case Study, Graeme Macrae Burnet presents these notebooks interspersed with his own biographical research into Collins Braithwaite. The result is a dazzling—and often wickedly humorous—meditation on the nature of sanity, identity and truth itself, by one of the most inventive novelists writing today.

ABOUT GRAEME MACRAE BURNET

Graeme Macrae Burnet is among Scotland’s leading contemporary novelists. Best known for his dazzling Booker-shortlisted second novel, His Bloody Project (2015), he is also the author of two Simenon-influenced novels: The Disappearance of Adele Bedeau (2014) and The Accident on the A35 (2017). Burnet has appeared at literary festivals in Australia, the USA, Germany, India, Russia, Spain, France, Korea, Denmark and Estonia. His novels have been translated into more than twenty languages and achieved bestseller status in several countries. He lives and works in Glasgow.

ROMANTIC shortlisted for the DEREK WALCOTT POETRY PRIZE

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We’re pleased to share that Romantic by Mark Callanan (October 12, 2021) has been shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry!

The Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry is presented by Arrowsmith Press, in partnership with The Derek Walcott Festival in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, and the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, and is awarded to a full-length book of poems by a non-US citizen published in the previous calendar year. This year’s judge is Carolyn Forché.

The prize includes a $1,000 cash award, along with a reading at the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre in Boston. Winners will be announced on October 13, 2022.

Get your copy of Romantic here!

ABOUT ROMANTIC

A CBC Best Canadian Poetry Book of 2021

Drawing on Arthurian myth, the Romantic poets, the ill-fated “Great War” efforts of the Newfoundland Regiment, modern parenthood, 16-bit video games, and Major League Baseball, these poems examine the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, both as individuals and as communities, in order to explain how and why we are the way we are. At its heart, Romantic interrogates our western society’s idealized, self-deluding personal and cultural perspectives.

ABOUT MARK CALLANAN

Mark Callanan is the author of two previous poetry collections, Gift Horse (Véhicule Press, 2011) and Scarecrow (Killick Press, 2003), as well as two poetry chapbooks, Skylarking (Anstruther Press, 2020) and Sea Legend (Frog Hollow Press, 2010). He was a founding editor of the St. John’s-based literary journal Riddle Fence, and co-edited The Breakwater Book of Contemporary Newfoundland Poetry (Breakwater Books, 2013). He lives in St. John’s with his wife, poet and critic Andreae Callanan, and their four children.

CHEMICAL VALLEY wins the ATLANTIC BOOK AWARDS’ ALISTAIR MACLEOD PRIZE!

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Chemical Valley coverBiblioasis is thrilled to share that last night, on Thursday, June 9 at 6:30PM EST, it was announced by the Atlantic Book Awards that Chemical Valley by David Huebert won the Alistair MacLeod Prize for Short Fiction!

The prize for the Alistair MacLeod Prize for Short Fiction is $1000, and celebrates excellent short story collections by writers who are either from the Atlantic Provinces, or live there now.

Here’s what the jury had to say about Chemical Valley:

In this courageous collection, David Huebert holds little back as he weaves superbly crafted stories of the dark, difficult, and gritty reality of being human. Whether it be the destructive impact we have on our environment, each other, or ourselves, Huebert tackles this challenge with intelligence and compassion, both in his language and style, and in the empathy with which he portrays the human experience. The intertwining of ugliness, beauty, metallic cold and human warmth, and destruction and hope, creates a visceral, hopeful, and rewarding experience for the reader.

The other finalists for the Alistair MacLeod Prize were: The Running Trees by Amber McMillan (Goose Lane Editions) and The Love Olympics by Claire Wilkshire (Breakwater Books).

Chemical Valley was also named a finalist for the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award. A huge congratulations from all of us to David!

ABOUT CHEMICAL VALLEY

A Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award Finalist • An Alistair MacLeod Prize for Short Fiction Finalist • A 2022 ReLit Award Finalist • A Siskiyou Prize Semi-Finalist • A Miramichi Reader Best Fiction Title of 2021

Out there by the dock the ocean and the air are just layers of shadow and darkness. But the creature’s flesh hums through the dark—a seep of violet in the weeping night.

From refinery operators to long term care nurses, dishwashers to preppers to hockey enforcers, Chemical Valley’s compassionate and carefully wrought stories cultivate rich emotional worlds in and through the dankness of our bio-chemical animacy. Full-hearted, laced throughout with bruised optimism and sincere appreciation of the profound beauty of our wilted, wheezing world, Chemical Valley doesn’t shy away from urgent modern questions—the distribution of toxicity, environmental racism, the place of technoculture in this ecological spasm—but grounds these anxieties in the vivid and often humorous intricacies of its characters’ lives. Swamp-wrought and heartfelt, these stories run wild with vital energy, tilt and teeter into crazed and delirious loves.

David Huebert – cr. Nicola Davison

ABOUT DAVID HUEBERT

David Huebert’s writing has won the CBC Short Story Prize, The Walrus Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the 2020 Journey Prize. David’s fiction debut, Peninsula Sinking, won a Dartmouth Book Award, was shortlisted for the Alistair MacLeod Short Fiction Prize, and was runner-up for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award. David’s work has been published in magazines such as The Walrus, Maisonneuve, enRoute, and Canadian Notes & Queries, and anthologized in Best Canadian Stories and The Journey Prize Stories. David teaches literature and creative writing at The University of New Brunswick.

Pick up your copy of Chemical Valley from Biblioasis here!

MUSIC, LATE AND SOON a finalist for THE MAVIS GALLANT PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION

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coverWe’re thrilled to share that on Friday, October 15, Music, Late and Soon (August 24, 2021) by Robyn Sarah was announced as a finalist for the Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-fiction, presented by the Quebec Writers’ Foundation! The winner will be announced during a live-streamed gala event hosted by Giller prize-winning author Sean Michaels on November 24 at 7PM.

Since 1988, the QWF Literary Awards have celebrated the best books and plays published or performed by English-language writers and translators in Quebec, as well as those translating English works from Quebec into French. Each award comes with a purse of $3,000.

The other finalists for the Mavis Gallant Prize include: Tanya Bellehumeur-Allatt’s Peacekeeper’s Daughter: A Middle-East Memoir (Thistledown Press), Karen Messing’s Bent Out of Shape (Between the Lines), André Picard’s Neglected No More: The Urgent Need to Improve the Lives of Canada’s Elders in the Wake of a Pandemic (Random House Canada), and Samir Shaheen-Hussain’s Fighting for a Hand to Hold: Confronting Medical Colonialism Against Indigenous Children in Canada (McGill-Queen’s University Press).

The winner will be announced during a live-streamed gala event hosted by Giller prize-winning author Sean Michaels on November 24 at 7PM.

 

ABOUT MUSIC, LATE AND SOON

A poet rediscovers the artistic passion of her youth—and pays tribute to the teacher she thought she’d lost.

After thirty-five years as an “on-again, off-again, uncoached closet pianist,” poet and writer Robyn Sarah picked up the phone one day and called her old piano teacher, whom she had last seen in her early twenties. Music, Late and Soon is the story of her return to studying piano with the mentor of her youth. In tandem, she reflects on a previously unexamined musical past: a decade spent at Quebec’s Conservatoire de Musique, studying clarinet—ostensibly headed for a career as an orchestral musician, but already a writer at heart. A meditation on creative process in both music and literary art, this two-tiered musical autobiography interweaves past and present as it tracks the author’s long-ago defection from a musical career path and her late re-embrace of serious practice. At its core is a portrait of an extraordinary piano teacher and of a relationship remembered and renewed.

ABOUT ROBYN SARAH

Robyn Sarah is the author of eleven collections of poems, two collections of short stories, and a book of essays on poetry. Her tenth poetry collection, My Shoes Are Killing Me, won the Governor General’s Award for poetry in 2015.  In 2017 Biblioasis published a forty-year retrospective, Wherever We Mean to Be: Selected Poems, 1975-2015. Sarah’s writing has appeared widely in Canada, the United States, and the U.K.  Her poems have been anthologized in Best Canadian Poetry, 15 Canadian Poets x 2 and x 3, The Bedford Anthology of Literature, and The Norton Anthology of Poetry, and a dozen of them were broadcast by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac. From 2011 until 2020 she served as poetry editor for Cormorant Books. She has lived for most of her life in Montréal.

 

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