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DREAMING HOME wins the 2024 Fred Kerner Book Award!

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We’re excited to share that Dreaming Home by Lucian Childs has won the Canadian Authors’ Association’s 2024 Fred Kerner Book Award! View the official announcement here.

On Dreaming Home, one judge commented,

“From the opening sentence we know we’re in the hands of a master craftsman. This novel opens up through multiple, connected points of view into a landscape that’s deeply problematic: from the damaged father, through the gay son who refuses to accept the deal he’s been dealt, to the sister who propelled them into this abyss. Trauma impacts them all in unexpected and illuminating ways. Challenging and poignant, but ultimately joyful.”

Another judge praised,

“A poignant and sensitively written story of the profound repercussions of a forced outage of a young boy by his sibling and the decades-long fallout that ensues for him, his family members, and his lovers. Told from multiple perspectives, the narrative is compelling and heartbreaking, with a gentle hint of humour.”

The Fred Kerner Book Award is awarded annually to a Canadian Authors Association member who has the best overall book published in the previous calendar year, including fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

Grab a copy of Dreaming Home here!

ABOUT DREAMING HOME

Winner of the 2024 Fred Kerner Book Award • Shortlisted for the 2024 Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize • A Globe and Mail Best Spring Book • One of Lambda Literary Review‘s Most Anticipated LGBTQ+ Books of June 2023 • A Southern Review Book to Celebrate in June 2023 • A 49th Shelf Best Book of 2023

When a sister’s casual act of betrayal awakens their father’s demons—ones spawned by his time in Vietnamese POW camps—the effects of the ensuing violence against her brother ripple out over the course of forty years, from Lubbock, to San Francisco, to Fort Lauderdale. Swept up in this arc, the members of this family and their loved ones tell their tales. A queer coming-of-age, and coming-to-terms, and a poignant exploration of all the ways we search for home, Dreaming Home is the unforgettable story of the fragmenting of an American family.

Credit: Marc Lostracco

ABOUT LUCIAN CHILDS

Lucian Childs is a fiction writer living in Toronto, Ontario. His debut novel-in-stories, Dreaming Home (Biblioasis 2023), was the winner of the Fred Kerner Book Award and was shortlisted for the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize in literary fiction. He was a Peter Taylor Fellow at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, a recipient of the Rasmuson Foundation Individual Artist Project Award and a finalist for the Faulkner-Wisdom Short Story Award. He is a contributing editor of Lambda Literary Award finalist, Building Fires in the Snow: A Collection of Alaska LGBTQ Short Fiction and Poetry. His stories and book reviews have appeared in the literary journals Grain, Plenitude, The Ex-Puritan and Prairie Fire, among others. For more about his work, please visit www.lucianchilds.com.

1934 wins the 2024 Speaker’s Book Award!

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We’re thrilled to share that on November 4th, 1934: The Chatham Coloured All-Stars’ Barrier-Breaking Year by Heidi LM Jacobs was named the winner of the 2024 Speaker’s Book Award. 1934 was published in June 2023 by Biblioasis. You can read the official announcement here.

The Honourable Ted Arnott, Speaker of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario, made the announcement at a ceremony at the Legislative Building, Queen’s Park.

Launched in 2012, the Speaker’s Book Award honours non-fiction works by Ontario authors reflecting the diverse culture and rich history of the province and its residents. Winning books are available for sale at the Legislative Gift Shop and featured in the Legislative Library.

Get your copy of 1934 here!

ABOUT 1934: THE CHATHAM COLOURED ALL-STARS’ BARRIER-BREAKING YEAR

Winner of the 2024 Speaker’s Book Award

The true story of the first Black team to win an Ontario Baseball Amateur Association championship.

The pride of Chatham’s East End, the Coloured All-Stars broke the colour barrier in baseball more than a decade before Jackie Robinson did the same in the Major Leagues. Fielding a team of the best Black baseball players from across southwestern Ontario and Michigan, theirs is a story that could only have happened in this particular time and place: during the depths of the Great Depression, in a small industrial town a short distance from the American border, home to one of the most vibrant Black communities in Canada.

Drawing heavily on scrapbooks, newspaper accounts, and oral histories from members of the team and their families, 1934: The Chatham Coloured All-Stars’ Barrier-Breaking Year shines a light on a largely overlooked chapter of Black baseball. But more than this, 1934 is the story of one group of men who fought for the respect that was too often denied them.

Rich in detail, full of the sounds and textures of a time long past, 1934 introduces the All-Stars’ unforgettable players and captures their winning season, so that it almost feels like you’re sitting there in Stirling Park’s grandstands, cheering on the team from Chatham.

Credit: Lively Creative Co.

ABOUT HEIDI LM JACOBS

Heidi LM Jacobs’ previous books include the novel Molly of the Mall: Literary Lass and Purveyor of Fine Footwear (NeWest Press, 2019), which won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour in 2020, and 100 Miles of Baseball: Fifty Games, One Summer (with Dale Jacobs, Biblioasis, 2021). She is a librarian at the University of Windsor and one of the researchers behind the award-winning Breaking the Colour Barrier: Wilfred “Boomer” Harding & the Chatham Coloured All-Stars project.

STANDING HEAVY translator FRANK WYNNE wins the SCOTT MONCRIEFF TRANSLATION PRIZE

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We’re thrilled to share that the Society of Authors announced the winners of their prestigious translation prizes with a combined prize fund of $47,000 CAD, and among them is Frank Wynne, who has been awarded the Scott Moncrieff Prize for his translation from the French of Standing Heavy by GauZ’, which was published in North America by Biblioasis on October 3rd, 2023 and by MacLehose Press in the UK.

Scott Moncrieff Prize for Translation judge Jane MacKenzie says of Standing Heavy,

“The writing is searingly witty, incisive, full of vivid imagery, and has been superbly translated by Frank Wynne, losing none of the humour, the energy, the authentic street view. This is a true tour-de-force in both languages, and reads as joyfully and sharply in English as it does in French.”

The novel follows three generations of African security guards as they contend with a society growing more and more hostile to immigration. It offers a funny, fast-paced, and poignant take on the legacy of Franco-African history, and has received many excellent reviews from the New York Times, Financial Times, Elle Magazine, The Walrus, Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly.

Biblioasis publisher Dan Wells says,

“Frank Wynne is a marvel, one of the best translators at work in any language: in this translation of Standing Heavy he’s given us monoglots the next best thing to reading him in the original: a sharp-eared, playful, elegant work of fiction. We’re very happy for him, and for GauZ’: may this bring him a few more readers in English.”

The Society of Authors awards prizes for translations from seven languages including the Scott Moncrieff Prize, an annual award for translations into English of full-length French works of literary merit and general interest. The winner is awarded £3,000 and a runner-up is awarded £1,000. This year’s judges were Constance Bantman, Jane MacKenzie and David Mills.

Get your copy of Standing Heavy here!

ABOUT STANDING HEAVY

Shortlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize • One of The Walrus‘ Best Fall Books of 2023

A funny, fast-paced, and poignant take on Franco-African history, as told through the eyes of three African security guards in Paris.

All over the city, they are watching: Black men paid to stand guard, invisible among the wealthy flâneurs and yet the only ones who truly see. From Les Grands Moulins to a Sephora on the Champs-Élysées, Ferdinand, Ossiri, and Kassoum find their way as undocumented workers amidst political infighting and the ever-changing landscape of immigration policy. Fast-paced and funny, poignant and sharply satirical, Standing Heavy is a searing deconstruction of colonial legacies and capitalist consumption and an unforgettable account of everything that passes under the security guards’ all-seeing eyes.

ABOUT FRANK WYNNE

Frank Wynne, the translator of Standing Heavy, is an award-winning Irish writer and translator from French and Spanish. Over a career spanning more than twenty years, Wynne has translated a wide variety of authors, including GauZ’, Michel Houellebecq, Patrick Modiano, and Emiliano Monge. This is the third time he has been awarded both the Scott Moncrieff Prize for Translation from the French and he has twice won the Premio Valle Inclán for translation from Spanish. His translation of Animalia by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo won the 2020 Republic of Consciousness Prize.

ABOUT GAUZ’

GauZ’ is an Ivorian author, journalist and screenwriter. After studying biochemistry, he moved to Paris as an undocumented student, working as a security guard before returning to the Côte d’Ivoire. His debut novel, Standing Heavy, won the Prix des libraires Gibert Joseph and the English translation was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. It was followed by Comrade Papa, which won the 2019 Prix Éthiophile, and Black Manoo. GauZ’ is the editor-in-chief of the satirical economic newspaper News & co, and has written screenplays and documentary films.

CONFESSIONS WITH KEITH wins the 2023 CITY OF VICTORIA BUTLER BOOK PRIZE!

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We’re thrilled to share that Pauline Holdstock has won the 2023 City of Victoria Butler Book Prize for Confessions with Keith! Check out the full announcement on their website here.

Mayor Marianne Alto and co-sponsor Brian Butler announced the winner at the 20th annual Victoria Book Prize Gala on October 11, 2023 at the Union Club of British Columbia.

Established in 2004, the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize is a partnership between the City of Victoria and Brian Butler of Butler Brothers Supplies. It awards a $5,000 prize to a Greater Victoria author for the best book published in the categories of fiction, non-fiction or poetry.

Grab your copy of Confessions with Keith here.

ABOUT CONFESSIONS WITH KEITH

Winner of the 2023 City of Victoria Butler Book Prize

An outrageously comic novel documents a middle-aged writer and mother’s grappling with mid-life crisis—her husband’s and her own.

Preoccupied with her fledgling literary career, intent on the all-consuming consolations of philosophy, and scrambling to meet the demands of her four children, the acutely myopic and chronically inattentive Vita Glass doesn’t notice that her house and her marriage are competing to see which can fall apart fastest. She can barely find time for her writing career, and just when her newfound success in vegetable erotica is beginning to take off. Our heroine’s only tried and trusted escape is the blissful detachment of Keith’s hairdressing salon, but when her husband leaves the country, unannounced, she decides to do likewise—in the opposite direction, and with their children. Drawn from the pages of Vita’s journal, this outrageously comic novel documents Vita’s passage through a mid-life crisis and explores all the ways we deceive each other and ourselves.

ABOUT PAULINE HOLDSTOCK

Pauline Holdstock is an internationally published novelist, short fiction writer and essayist. Her novels have been shortlisted for a number of awards, among them the Best First Novel Award, the Scotia Bank Giller prize and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Her historical novel Beyond Measure was the winner of the BC Book Prizes Ethel Wilson Award for Fiction. The Hunter and the Wild Girl won the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize. Pauline lives just outside Victoria on Vancouver Island.