Alice Munro

The Trillium Book Awards were handed out on Tuesday at a dinner in Toronto. Michael Chan, the Minister of Tourism, Culture, and Sport presented the awards which honour literary excellence in works published in Ontario in both official languages.

Alice Munro won her third Trillium Book Award for her collection Dear Life: Stories (McClelland & Stewart). She previously won the prize in 1991 for Friend of my Youth, and in 1999 for The Love of a Good Woman.

The other winners are:

Trillium Book Award for English-language Poetry
Matthew Tierney, Probably Inevitable (Coach House Books)

Trillium Book Award in French-language
Paul Savoie, Bleu bémol (Éditions David)

Trillium Book Award for French-language Children’s Literature
Claude Forand, Un moine trop bavard (Éditions David)

Munro and Savoie both received $20,000, while Tierney and Forand took home $10,000 each.

As the spring season winds down, here are just a few highlights from the past month’s many award ceremonies, receptions, parties, and launches.

Click on the thumbnails to browse the slideshow.

•  Oliver Pötzsch is Amazon Publishing’s first million-copy selling author
• New DRM changes text of ebooks to catch pirates
• Kim Jong Un reportedly gave Mein Kampf to senior officials
• German bookseller rejects Vancouver publisher’s gay anthology
• Relationship between twitter, authors, and writing

• Vice takes down “fashion spread” based on women writer suicides
• Canada’s former chief librarian and archivist criticizes private digitizing deal
• Public libraries in America outnumber McDonalds and Starbucks
• Stephen King pledges $3 million to repair local library in Maine
• Pearson and HarperCollins to close New Zealand operations

Type Books on Queen Street West in Toronto has a new window display celebrating Corey Mintz’s book, How to Host a Dinner Party (House of Anansi Press). The display was designed by Type staffer Kalpna Patel.

Click on the thumbnails to see details.

On June 15 at a ceremony in Orillia, Ontario, Vancouver’s Christopher Meades was presented with the Canadian Authors Association’s fiction award for his novel The Last Hiccup (ECW Press).

Founded in 1975, the CAA Literary Awards are presented to writers who “achieve excellence without sacrificing popular appeal.”

The other winners are:

CAA Lela Common Award for Canadian History
Michael S. Cross, A Biography of Robert Baldwin: The Morning-Star of Memory (Oxford University Press)

CAA Poetry Award
Don McKay, Paradoxides (McClelland & Stewart)

2013 Emerging Writers
Claire Battershill, Jay Bahadur

Each winner receives $2,000 and a silver medal. Co-winnersBattershill and Bahadur split the $500 prize for emerging writer.

 

Robert Kennedy

A little more than a year after taking over Robert Kennedy Publishing, CEO and publisher Tosca Reno has announced the company’s closure.

On a blog post on her personal website, Reno confirms that the fitness publisher’s parent company, Canusa, filed for bankruptcy on June 7.

Canadian magazines website Masthead refers to a rep from estate trustee Deloitte & Touche, who says that Canusa’s assets will be sold: “They’re still looking at different ways of how they’re going to do this. We have a lot of issues with copyright, and who owns what, so that might have to be sorted out first.”

A creditors meeting is scheduled for June 27. 

Robert Kennedy, who founded RKP in 1967, named his wife, Reno, a best-selling author and fitness activist, as his successor before his death last April. On her website, Reno writes:

As many of you know, last year I lost my husband of 8 years and reluctantly took the helm of the distressed publishing business he built. Robert was a tremendous visionary who grew a unit of bodybuilding, health, fitness and clean-eating magazines and books, that were global staples, in its long-distant prime days… Due to many years of financial difficulty, I was forced to make the decision to restructure the business as a whole in order to allow our brands, Oxygen, Cleaning Eating and The Eat-Clean Diet to possibly find a new home, where my hope is they can thrive again.

(photo: Greg Locke)

In the June 2013 issue of Q&Q, Mark Callanan speaks to Lisa Moore about her third novel, Caught, a story of courage and escape

When Lisa Moore’s February won the CBC’s Canada Reads competition earlier this year, I was painting crown mouldings in the sunroom of a gargantuan Victorian-era house in St. John’s. This is not an important fact except insofar as it illustrates my sense of bearing witness to a momentous occasion, and therefore being finely attuned to my surroundings at the time.

Moore’s novel takes place in the aftermath of the sinking of the Ocean Ranger oil platform, a tragedy that profoundly affects the book’s protagonist. This year marks the 31st anniversary of the disaster, which is indelibly etched in the minds of Newfoundlanders. As the broadcast came down to the final vote, I felt that something big was at stake. This wasn’t just about a book; for the families and loved ones of the 84 men who died, it was public acknowledgment of a lasting grief.

Upon the launch of her third novel, Caught (published this month by House of Anansi Press), Moore accepts the Canada Reads victory with gratitude and equanimity. “I was aware throughout the entire process – hyperaware – that there were many other books that could have been on any one of those lists, and even as the list got winnowed I really saw it as a lottery,” she says, sitting in the fog-enshrouded light shining through a bank of windows in the kitchen of her downtown St. John’s row house. The tempo of her speech slows as she continues: “Outside of the quality of writing or the book or anything to do with me, I felt glad that the subject of the Ocean Ranger was spoken about, particularly on the anniversary. And that was intensely emotional.”

Click here to read the rest of the story.

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• How high-school reading lists have changed since 1907
• Paying tribute to Judy Blume’s Forever
• Vote for CBC Books’ “ultimate undead” literary character

Canadian poet David McFadden briefly took to the stage at last night’s Griffin Poetry Prize gala to accept the $65,000 award – the richest in the world for a single book of poetry – for his latest collection, What’s the Score?, published by Toronto’s Mansfield Press.

“It’s an unexpected honour, and I’m thrilled to the bone,” he told a crowd gathered in the atrium of the Corus Entertainment building on Toronto’s waterfront.

In the international category, the Griffin was awarded to Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan for Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me, and Other Poems (Yale University Press), translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah. Both were in attendance, despite the fact that Zaqtan had difficulty entering the country.

In a short, emotional acceptance speech, McFadden thanked his “wonderful and beloved” editor at Mansfield, Stuart Ross.

Ross, a poet in his own right, first came across McFadden’s work as a teenager. “I feel humbled that pretty much my all-time poetry hero is a guy that I now can work with and help get those books out,” he told Q&Q.

Ross was tapped to edit McFadden’s collection of selected poems, Why Are You So Sad? (Insomniac Press), which received a Griffin nomination in 2008. 

“He’s not an academic, he’s not a wildly experimental poet, he’s not a classical poet. He’s a really plainspoken but profound poet,” said Ross. “It’s exciting that poetry like that can be recognized. As an editor, it’s absolutely amazing.” 

Ross added that the Griffin win is “really important” for Mansfield. As he told Q&Q in April, “Although there are some ‘big’ small presses that everyone always dreams of being published by, there are small presses who are publishing work that is as worthy as anything else out there.”

A jury consisting of U.S. poet Mark Doty, Chinese-American poet and author Wang Ping, and 2011 Griffin nominee Suzanne Buffam selected the two winners from 509 books of poetry submitted from 40 countries around the globe, including 15 translations.

 – With files from Stuart Woods

Correction June 17: A previous version of this article included incorrect juror names and number of submissions received in 2013.

The League of Canadian Poets revealed the winners for its three annual awards June 8 at the LCP Poetry Festival and Conference in Toronto.

The Pat Lowther Memorial Award is given for a book of poetry by a Canadian woman published in the preceding year. The Gerald Lampert Memorial Award recognizes the best first book of poetry published by a Canadian in the preceding year. The Raymond Souster Award is given for a book of poetry by an LCP member published in the preceding year. Each award carries a $1,000 prize.

Pat Lowther Memorial Award
Song and Spectacle, Rachel Rose (Harbour Publishing)

Gerald Lampert Memorial Award
Notebook M, Gillian Savigny (Insomniac Press)

Raymond Souster Award 
The New Measures, A.F. Moritz (House of Anansi Press)

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• Literature’s most disturbing sociopaths

 

Basil Papademos won the Bisexual Erotic Fiction award for his novel Mount Royal (Tightrope Books) at the Bisexual Book Awards in New York City on June 2. According to the website examiner.com, while on his way home to Montreal, Papademos was stopped by border patrol, detained, searched, and interrogated.

“I’d thrown it [the award] on top of my stuff before closing my bag and heading for Montreal. When the border cops opened my bag they pulled out the trophy and I swear to goddess, the guy sneered and said: ‘I didn’t know they give awards out for being bisexual.’

I, of course, could not resist replying: ‘Only if you’re really good.’

It went downhill from there. I was detained in a holding cell for over eight hours where I was interrogated. They seized my phone and computer, claiming my work could ‘possibly be considered obscene according to Canadian law.’”

Papademos told the Examiner he suspects he might have been stopped because he used to live in Bangkok and authorities may have assumed he had been there for the purposes of child pornography.

Papademos has not filed a complaint, worrying he will be stopped every time he crosses the border.

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The Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia has announced the shortlists for the WFNS Literary Awards. The awards celebrate and promote excellence in writing from Canada’s Atlantic region. Jurors picked the nine finalists from 68 submissions for the three awards.

Winners will be announced at a ceremony in Halifax on Sept. 21.

The nominees are:

The Atlantic Poetry Prize

• I’m Alive. I Believe in Everything, Lesley Choyce (Breton Books)
• Church of the Exquisite Panic: The Ophelia Poems, Carole Glasser Langille (Pedlar Press)
• Whiteout, George Murray (ECW Press)

The Evelyn Richardson Memorial Non-fiction Award

• Shadowboxing, Steven Laffoley (Pottersfield Press)
• The Discovery of Weather, Jerry Lockett (Formac Lorimer Books)
• Cape Breton Railways: An Illustrated History, Herb MacDonald (Cape Breton University Press)

The Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award

• Dirty Bird, Keir Lowther (Tightrope Books)
• The Deception of Livvy Higgs, Donna Morrissey (Viking Canada)
• Whirl Away, Russell Wangersky (Thomas Allen Publishers)

• Genre-defying Scottish author Iain Banks dies
• Long-lost diary of top Hitler aide found
• Kids write about their battles with illness
• Cicada’s song in poetry
• Analyzing gender balance in U.K. literary criticism

In the June issue, Q&Q looks ahead at fall’s most anticipated books for young readers.

Click on the thumbnails to see highlights of children’s fiction, non-fiction, and picture books.

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• Ireland’s new stamp features short story by 17-year-old writer
• British booksellers demand government support in fight against Amazon
• Fostering a startup economy for the publishing industry
• Q&A with Khaled Hosseini