Sixteen writers, including Miriam Toews, Rawi Hage and Margaret Visser, are in competition for a total of $155,000 in prize money as part of the annual Writers' Trust of Canada awards honouring excellence in fiction and non-fiction.
The short lists in various categories for work published in 2008 were announced yesterday in Toronto. Winners are to be named Nov. 17. This is the first time winners are to be named during the busy fall literary season, which is also highlighted by the Scotiabank Giller Prize for English-language fiction and the Governor-General's Literary Awards. While the trust's annual fund-raising gala has traditionally been held in the fall, nominees for its prize have usually been announced in February.
Toews's latest novel, The Flying Troutmans, as well as Hage's newest, Cockroach, are among the five finalists for the $25,000 Writers' Trust fiction prize. The other nominees are poet Patrick Lane, for his first novel, Red Dog, Red Dog; Lee Henderson for his debut novel, The M an Game; and Rivka Galchen for her novel, another debut, Atmospheric Disturbances. (Galchen lives in New York City, but was born in Toronto.)
Visser's The Gift of Thanks: The Roots, Persistence and Paradoxical Meanings of a Social Ritual is a finalist for the $25,000 non-fiction prize, along with Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood by Taras Grescoe; Carl Honoré's U nder Pressure: Rescuing Childhood from the Culture of Hyper-Parenting; C oncrete Reveries: Consciousness and the City by Mark Kingwell; and Burning Down the House: Fighting Fire and Losing Myself by Russell Wangersky.
Vying for the $10,000 Writers' Trust/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize, given each year to a new writer whose short story or excerpt was published in a Canadian literary journal, are nominees Dana Mills, for Steaming for Godthab (published in Geist), Saleema Nawaz, for My Three Girls (Prairie Review) and Clea Young for Chaperone (Grain Magazine).
Two previous awards – the $10,000 Marian Engel Award (given to a published female author in mid-career) and the $15,000 Timothy Findley Prize (the male equivalent of the Engel) – have been merged into a new, non-competitive, non-gender-specific prize, the Writers' Trust Notable Author Award, valued at $25,000.
Three other non-competitive prizes also will be handed out Nov. 17: the Matt Cohen Award ($20,000 to a Canadian writer with a distinguished lifetime body of work), the Vicky Metcalf Award ($20,000 to a writer with a distinguished body of work targeted to a younger audience) and the Writers' Trust Award for Distinguished Contribution (a non-monetary prize given to an individual or organization with a long-standing relationship with the Writers' Trust. Previous winners have included writers June Callwood, Graeme Gibson and Pierre Berton).
