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THE HOLLOW BEAST a finalist for the 2024 GOVERNOR GENERAL’S AWARD IN TRANSLATION!

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We are thrilled to share that this morning, The Hollow Beast by Christophe Bernard, translated by Lazer Lederhendler, was listed as a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation! You can check out the official finalists announcement here.

The winning books will be announced on November 13, 2024. 

Montreal-based Lazer Lederhendler is no stranger to this honour, having previously won the Governor General’s Award for French to English translation three times, including for two other Biblioasis books, The Party Wall by Catherine Leroux and If You Hear Me by Pascale Quiviger. The Hollow Beast marks his eleventh nomination overall.

Lazer commented on his nomination:

“It’s always gratifying to know that one’s work as a translator is appreciated by readers, particularly when those readers make up the peer assessment committee for this year’s GG translation award. I feel especially honoured to be part of such a remarkable group of finalists.”

“We’re very pleased that Lazer was recognized for his work translating this beast of a novel,” Biblioasis publisher Dan Wells said. “More than 150,000 words, complete with rural dialects, regional word-play, and as crazy a plot as has appeared in the past calendar year, Lazer’s work translating The Hollow Beast confirms as much as his three previous GG Awards for translation (and eight additional nominations!) that he has long been one of the pre-eminent translators in the country. This was heroic work, and I’m glad his jury of fellow translators gave Lazer an additional nod.”

The Canada Council for the Arts funds, administers and actively promotes the Governor General’s Literary Awards (GGBooks) which celebrate literature and inspire people to read books by creators from Canada. The award provides finalists and winners with valuable recognition from peers and readers across the country. The monetary award for finalists is $1,000, and $25,000 for each winning book.

Congratulations to Lazer and The Hollow Beast from all of us at Biblioasis!

Grab a copy of The Hollow Beast here!

ABOUT THE HOLLOW BEAST

Don Quixote meets Who Framed Roger Rabbit in this slapstick epic about destiny, family demons, and revenge.

Credit: Monique Dykstra

1911. A hockey game in Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula. With the score tied two-two in overtime, local tough guy Billy Joe Pictou fires the puck directly into Monti Bouge’s mouth. When Pictou’s momentum carries them both across the goal line in a spray of shattered teeth, Victor Bradley, erstwhile referee and local mailman, rules that the goal counts—and Monti’s ensuing revenge for this injustice sprawls across three generations, one hundred years, and dozens of dastardly deeds. Fuelled by a bottomless supply of Yukon, the high-proof hooch that may or may not cause the hallucinatory sightings of a technicolor beast that haunts not just Monti but his descendants, it’s up to Monti’s grandson François—and his floundering doctoral dissertation—to make sense of the vendetta that’s shaped the destiny of their town and everyone in it. Brilliantly translated into slapstick English by Lazer Lederhendler, The Hollow Beast introduces Christophe Bernard as a master of epic comedy.

ABOUT LAZER LEDERHENDLER

Lazer Lederhendler is a full-time literary translator specializing in Québécois fiction and non-fiction. His translations have earned awards and distinctions in Canada, the UK, and the US. He has translated the works of noted authors, including Gaétan Soucy, Nicolas Dickner, Edem Awumey, Perrine Leblanc, and Catherine Leroux. He lives in Montreal with the visual artist Pierrette Bouchard.

ON COMMUNITY a finalist for the 2024 Firecracker Awards!

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We’re excited to share that On Community by Casey Plett has been announced as a finalist for the CLMP’s 2024 Firecracker Award in Creative Nonfiction! The list of finalists was published on May 15, 2024, and can be seen here.

The Community of Literary Magazines & Presses (CLMP), the national nonprofit organization that for 57 years has supported the work of independent literary publishers. The Firecracker Awards, now in their tenth year, are given for the best independently published books of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry and the best literary magazines in the categories of debut and general excellence.

The winners of the Firecracker Awards will be announced at a virtual awards ceremony on June 27, 2024, at 6PM ET.

Get your copy of On Community here!

ABOUT ON COMMUNITY

Finalist for the 2024 Firecracker Award in Creative Nonfiction • Shortlisted for the 2024 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction • Finalist for the 2024 Leslie Feinberg Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature • One of CBC Books‘ Canadian Nonfiction to Read in the Fall • A Tyee Best Book of 2023 • A CBC Books Best Nonfiction Book of 2023 • A Hamilton Review of Books Best Book of 2023 • An Autostraddle Best Queer Book of 2023

We need community to live. But what does it look like? Why does it often feel like it’s slipping away?

We are all hinged to some definition of a community, be it as simple as where we live, complex as the beliefs we share, or as intentional as those we call family. In an episodic personal essay, Casey Plett draws on a range of firsthand experiences to start a conversation about the larger implications of community as a word, an idea, and a symbol. With each thread a cumulative definition of community, and what it has come to mean to Plett, emerges.

Looking at phenomena from transgender literature, to Mennonite history, to hacker houses of Silicon Valley, and the rise of nationalism in North America, Plett delves into the thorny intractability of community’s boons and faults. Deeply personal, authoritative in its illuminations, On Community is an essential contribution to the larger cultural discourse that asks how, and to what socio-political ends, we form bonds with one another.

Photo Credit: Hobbes Ginsberg

ABOUT CASEY PLETT

Casey Plett is the author of A Dream of a Woman, Little Fish, and A Safe Girl to Love, the co-editor of Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy From Transgender Writers, and the publisher at LittlePuss Press. She has written for the New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, the Guardian, Globe and Mail, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, the Winnipeg Free Press, and other publications. A winner of the Amazon First Novel Award and the Firecracker Award for Fiction, and a two-time winner of the Lambda Literary Award, her work has also been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize.

SLEEP IS NOW A FOREIGN COUNTRY a finalist for the Trillium Book Award!

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This morning the finalists for the Trillium Book Award, worth $20,000, were announced, and they include Sleep Is Now a Foreign Country by Mike Barnes, published by Biblioasis press on November 14, 2023. The prize is the province of Ontario’s leading literary award. You can view the full list of finalists here.

Biblioasis publisher Dan Wells says,

“Mike Barnes has been with the press for the entirety of our twenty-year history, over which time we’ve published nine books with him, including poetry, fiction, fable, and memoir: he never enters the same stream twice. He ranks, in my estimation, as among our very best writers: intelligent, adventurous, unerring, generous, and humane, and it gives me real pleasure that some long overdue acknowledgment has come for Sleep Is Now a Foreign Country, as courageous and felt a book as we’ve been part of at the press. I speak for all of us in offering Mike congratulations, and in thanking the jury for recognizing the astounding work this is.”

Barnes has written eleven books spanning many genres. His last nonfiction book, Be With: Letters to a Caregiver, was praised by Margaret Atwood as “Timely, lyrical, tough, accurate.” His most recent novel, The Adjustment League was a Maclean’s Editor’s Pick described as “masterful.” Barnes was born in Rochester, Minnesota, and he now lives in Toronto.

The Ontario government established the Trillium Book Award in 1987 to recognize excellence and foster increased public awareness of the quality and diversity of Ontario writers and writing. The quality of Ontario authors and writing speaks for itself with the international acclaim achieved by past Trillium winners including Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Timothy Findley and Anne Michaels. The winner of the 2024 Trillium Book Award will be announced at a gala event at the Arcadian Court in Toronto on June 20, 2024, hosted by CBC Anchor Heather Hiscox. More information about the Trillium Book Award can be found here.

Get your copy of Sleep is Now a Foreign Country here!

ABOUT SLEEP IS NOW A FOREIGN COUNTRY

Finalist for the 2024 Trillium Book Award • One of CBC Books’ Canadian Nonfiction to Read in the Fall

A poet recounts his experience with madness and explores the relationship between apprehension and imagination.

In the summer of 1977, standing on a roadside somewhere between Dachau and Munich, twenty-two-year-old Mike Barnes experienced the dawning of the psychic break he’d been anticipating almost all his life. “Times over the years when I have tried to describe what followed,” he writes of that moment, “it has always come out wrong.” In this finely wrought, deeply intelligent memoir of madness, its antecedents and its aftermath, Barnes reconstructs instead what led him to that moment and offers with his characteristic generosity and candor the captivating account of a mind restlessly aware of itself.

ABOUT MIKE BARNES

Mike Barnes is the author of twelve books of poetry, short fiction, novels, and memoir. He has won the Danuta Gleed Award and a National Magazine Award Silver Medal for his short fiction, and the Edna Staebler Award for his photo-and-text essay “Asylum Walk.” His most recent book of nonfiction, Be With: Letters to a Caregiver, was a finalist for the City of Toronto Book Award and has been praised by Margaret Atwood as “Timely, lyrical, tough, accurate.” He lives in Toronto.

ORDINARY WONDER TALES a finalist for the 2023 HILARY WESTON WRITERS’ TRUST PRIZE FOR NONFICTION!

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Biblioasis is thrilled to share that Ordinary Wonder Tales by Emily Urquhart (November 1, 2022) has been announced as a finalist for the 2023 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction! You can check out the full shortlist here. 

The 2023 jury citation for Ordinary Wonder Tales:

“Emily Urquhart’s collection of essays about folklore, storytelling, and wonder weaves its own magic as it draws the reader deep into the heart of imagination and possibility. From a haunting childhood encounter to a deeply moving exploration of dementia, Ordinary Wonder Tales delights in the knowledge that the world can be both real and imagined. As we read, we discover that no trauma in a person’s life ever sets them fully apart. Rather, human tragedies are endlessly absorbed and transformed by the wonder tales we share to bring us back to the fullness of life.”

“Everyone at Biblioasis is thrilled for Emily,” says Dan Wells, publisher of Biblioasis. “Ordinary Wonder Tales has been a favourite of everyone here at Biblioasis since its publication, a collection open to the everyday magic of everyday life, a book lyrical, meditative, humane and profound. It’s a delightful gathering of essays, and we’re thrilled that the Weston jury felt similarly about it.”

This is the fourth of Biblioasis’ books to be nominated for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction. Reaching Mithymna by Steven Heighton was nominated in 2020, The Great Escape by Andrew Steinmetz was nominated in 2013, and Why Not? Fifteen Reasons to Live by Ray Robertson was nominated in 2011.

The Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction was first awarded in 1997. It is given annually for excellence in the category of literary nonfiction, which includes essays, history, biography, memoir, commentary, and criticism. The winning book demonstrates a distinctive voice, as well as a persuasive and compelling command of tone, narrative, style, and technique. This award has been sponsored by The Hon. Hilary M. Weston since 2011 and is funded this year by the Hilary and Galen Weston Foundation. Beginning in 2023, the prize purse has increased from $60,000 to $75,000. The winner will be announced at the Writers’ Trust Awards on November 21.

Order your copy of Ordinary Wonder Tales here!

ABOUT ORDINARY WONDER TALES

Shortlisted for the 2023 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction

“This book is magical in every sense of the term.”—Amanda Leduc, author of The Centaur’s Wife and Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space

A journalist and folklorist explores the truths that underlie the stories we imagine—and reveals the magic in the everyday.

Photo Credit: Andrew Trant

“I’ve always felt that the term fairy tale doesn’t quite capture the essence of these stories,” writes Emily Urquhart. “I prefer the term wonder tale, which is Irish in origin, for its suggestion of awe coupled with narrative. In a way, this is most of our stories.” In this startlingly original essay collection, Urquhart reveals the truths that underlie our imaginings: what we see in our heads when we read, how the sight of a ghost can heal, how the entrance to the underworld can be glimpsed in an oil painting or a winter storm—or the onset of a loved one’s dementia. In essays on death and dying, pregnancy and prenatal genetics, radioactivity, chimeras, cottagers, and plague, Ordinary Wonder Tales reveals the essential truth: if you let yourself look closely, there is magic in the everyday.

ABOUT EMILY URQUHART

Emily Urquhart is a journalist with a doctorate in folklore. Her award-winning work has appeared in Longreads, Guernica, and The Walrus and elsewhere, and her first book, Beyond the Pale: Folklore, Family, and the Mystery of Our Hidden Genes, was shortlisted for the Kobo First Book Prize and the BC National Award for Canadian Nonfiction. Her most recent book, The Age of Creativity: Art, Memory, my Father and Me, was listed as a top book of 2020 by CBC, NOW Magazine and Quill & Quire. She is a nonfiction editor for The New Quarterly and lives in Kitchener, Ontario.

HOUSEHOLDERS a finalist for the Firecracker Awards!

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Householders coverWe’re thrilled to share that Householders by Kate Cayley (September 14, 2021) has been named a finalist for the 2022 Firecracker Award for Fiction! The shortlist was announced on the Firecracker Awards website on May 18, 2022. Check out the full list of finalists here.

The CLMP Firecracker Awards for Independently Published Literature are given annually to celebrate books and magazines that make a significant contribution to our literary culture and the publishers that strive to introduce important voices to readers far and wide. Each winner in the books category will receive $2,000–$1,000 for the press and $1,000 for the author or translator.

The winners will be announced on June 23, 2022, 7PM ET, at the virtual Firecracker Awards Ceremony. RSVP to watch here!

Get your copy of Householders here!

ABOUT HOUSEHOLDERS

A CBC BOOKS AND QUILL & QUIRE ANTICIPATED FALL BOOK • A LAMBDA LITERARY MOST ANTICIPATED LGBTQIA+ TITLE • A 49TH SHELF BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021

Linked short stories about families, nascent queers, and self-deluded utopians explore the moral ordinary strangeness in their characters’ overlapping lives.

A woman impersonates a nun online, with unexpected consequences. In a rapidly changing neighborhood, tensions escalate around two events planned for the same day. The barista girlfriend of a tech billionaire survives a zombie apocalypse only to face spending her life with the paranoid super-rich. From a university campus to an underground bunker, a commune in the woods to Toronto and back again, the linked stories in Householders move effortlessly between the commonplace and the fantastic. In deft and exacting narratives about difficult children and thorny friendships, hopeful revolutionaries and self-deluded utopians, nascent queers, sincere frauds, and families of all kinds, Kate Cayley mines the moral hazards inherent in the ways we try to save each other and ourselves.

ABOUT KATE CAYLEY

Kate Cayley has previously written a short story collection, two poetry collections, and a number of plays, both traditional and experimental, which have been produced in Canada and the US. She is a frequent writing collaborator with immersive company Zuppa Theatre. She has won the Trillium Book Award and an O. Henry Prize and been a finalist for the Governor General’s Award. She lives in Toronto with her wife and their three children.

CHEMICAL VALLEY a finalist for the Atlantic Book Awards!

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Chemical Valley coverChemical Valley by David Huebert (October 19, 2021), has been named a finalist for both the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award and the Alistair MacLeod Prize for Short Fiction, presented by the Atlantic Book Awards! The shortlist was announced on April 22, 2022 at the Frye Festival. The Thomas Raddall Award is one of Canada’s largest literary awards and comes with a $30,000 prize and the Alistair MacLeod Prize comes with a $1,000 prize.

Winners will be announced at the Atlantic Book Awards Gala on Thursday, June 9, 2022 at Paul O’Regan Hall in Halifax Central Library.

You can see the full list of finalists here.

Get your copy of Chemical Valley here!

ABOUT CHEMICAL VALLEY

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.

ABOUT DAVID HUEBERT

David Huebert – cr. Nicola Davison

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.

A GHOST IN THE THROAT a finalist for the NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS

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Biblioasis Title A Ghost in the Throat named a finalist by the National Book Critics Circle

WINDSOR, Ont.— On the evening of Thursday, January 20th, the National Book Critics Circle announced the finalists for the 2021 publishing year. Among them is A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa.

“We’re so very happy to receive this news, and thrilled for Doireann and hope that this will help to bring even more readers to her exceptional A Ghost in the Throat,” says Dan Wells, owner and publisher of Biblioasis. “We want to thank the NBCC jury, and offer congratulations to all of the other nominees, their publishers and editors.”

A Ghost in the Throat has received wide acclaim since its publication; winner of the 2020 Nonfiction Book of the Year from the An Post Irish Book Awards, winner of the 2020 Foyles Nonfiction Book of the Year, winner of the James Tait Black Biography Prize, shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, shortlisted for the 2021 Rathbones Folio Prize, longlisted for the 2021 Gordon Burn Prize, a Guardian Best Book of 2020, a 2021 Indie Next Pick, a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2021, a Book Riot Best Book of 2021, a New York Times Notable Book of 2021, a Kirkus Best Nonfiction Book of 2021, an NPR Best Book of 2021, a Chicago Public Library Best Book of 2021, a Globe and Mail Book of the Year, a Winnipeg Free Press Top Read of 2021, an Entropy Magazine Best of the Year, a LitHub Best Book of the Year, and a New York Times Critics’ Top Book of 2021.

Doireann Ní Ghríofa is also the author of six critically acclaimed books of poetry, each a deepening exploration of birth, death, desire, and domesticity. Awards for her writing include a Lannan Literary Fellowship (USA), the Ostana Prize (Italy), a Seamus Heaney Fellowship (Queen’s University), and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, among others. This is her first work of prose.

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 National Book Critics Circle Awards, founded in 1974 at the Algonquin Hotel and considered among the most prestigious in American letters, are the sole prizes bestowed by a jury of working critics and book review editors. The awards will be presented on March 17, 2022, in a virtual ceremony that will be free and open to the public.

For more information, please contact:

Erika Sanborn
Marketing & Publicity, Biblioasis
esanborn@biblioasis.com
519-915-3930

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.

 

Get your copy of Music, Late and Soon here!