Westwood Creative Artists, Canada’s largest literary agency representing more than 400 writers, is looking for a candidate to fill a full-time 12 week internship position, beginning August 24^th and ending November 13^th.

A considerable amount of time during this internship will be spent working with WCA’s  international rights manager and rights assistant in preparation for the Frankfurt Book Fair in October. There will also be the opportunity to work with other WCA agents and at the reception desk. In the rights department, the intern will be involved in catalogue proofreading, general preparation and follow-up for the Frankfurt Book Fair, draft international submission letters, and deal with scouts and co-agents around the world on a daily basis. There will also be some data entry and other administrative tasks. While working with individual agents, the intern will understand how the agent manages his or her authors, learn about Canadian and US submissions, and provide needed support in a varied number of capacities. At the reception desk, the intern will really be at the “nerve centre” of the agency. Tasks will include daily administration work, reading submissions, and receiving authors and publishers as they arrive at the agency.

We offer a competitive honorarium of $1500, a lively and congenial work environment at Spadina and Harbord, and an excellent opportunity to gain an overview of the publishing industry in Canada and abroad through the lens of the literary agent and the writers we represent.

The ideal candidate will be eager to learn, highly organized, energetic, and have a positive outlook. Strong proofreading and computer skills required; previous office experience and knowledge of the publishing industry an asset; passionate attention to detail and accuracy a must. Please send your resume and cover letter to the attention of Carolyn Forde at Carolyn@wcaltd.com at your earliest convenience or by July 22^nd. We appreciate all applications but will only reply to candidates selected for an interview.

Westwood is delighted to report that Darren Greer was awarded The Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia (WFNS) Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award for his novel, Just Beneath My Skin (Cormorant Books). Other authors up for the award included Michael Crummey and David Adams Richardss

The shortlists for the 2015 East Coast Literary Awards were released in May and the winners announced during a celebration on Saturday, June 6, 2015 at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in Halifax, NS.

The Awards Program celebrates and promotes excellence in writing from Canada’s Atlantic region. This year’s shortlist and winners included remarkable works written by Atlantic Canadians and published in 2014.

For more information on the 2015 East Coast Literary Awards, click here.

Just Beneath My Skin has also been chosen as Nova Scotia’s One Book One Province read for this year.

Indigo CEO Heather Reisman has chosen Melvis And Elvis by Dennis Lee, illustrated by bestselling Jeremy Tankard, as one of her “Heather’s Picks” for Summer 2015.

Melvis And Elvis is the Canadian kidslit legend’s first new children’s collection in more than a decade.

Listen to Reisman present the book on Canada A.M.with so much enthusiasm.

Congrats to Dennis and Jeremy!

The Arthur Ellis Award winners were announced last night, May 28, 2015, at a special awards ceremony held at the Arts and Letters Club in Toronto. Among the winners were Charlotte Gray, Steve Burrows, and Elle Wild.

Charlotte Gray won Best Nonfiction Book for The Massey Murder: A Maid, her Master and the Trial that Shocked a Country (HarperCollins)

Steve Burrows won Best First Novel for A Siege of Bitterns (Dundurn Press)

Elle Wild won the Unhanged Arthur for Best Unpublished First Crime Novel for Strange Things Done

Congratulations to all the winners! And congratulations to all nominees, it was a fantastic shortlist!

Westwood is proud to announce that Elizabeth Renzetti, Kim Fu, Ghalib Islam, and Steve Burrows have been nominated for the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize!

The annual award, designed to kick-start the careers of debut authors, will award a $10,000 CAD cash prize to a book in each of three categories: Literary Fiction, Genre Fiction (beginning with Mystery this year), and Non-Fiction.

Our authors have been nominated in the following categories:

Literary Fiction

• Based on a True Story by Elizabeth Renzetti – House of Anansi Press
• For Today I Am a Boy by Kim Fu – HarperCollins Canada
• Fire In The Unnameable Country by Ghalib Islam – Penguin Canada

Fiction (Mystery)

• A Siege of Bitterns: A Birder Murder Mystery by Steve Burrows – Dundurn

The shortlist, selected by Kobo’s team of booksellers and taking into consideration book completion rates, customer ratings and reviews, comprises five books in each genre. The shortlist will now move on to the final selection process, led by top Canadian authors: Charlotte Gray for Non-Fiction, Miriam Toews for Literary Fiction, and Ian Hamilton for Genre Fiction (Mystery), with winners announced on July 7.

For the complete shortlist, click here.

The winners of the 2015 BC Book Prizes have been announced and Eve Joseph has won the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize!

Joseph’s book, In the Slender Margin: The Intimate Strangeness of Death and Dying (HarperCollins Canada), is part memoir, part meditation, and explores death from an “insider’s” point of view. Using the threads of her brother’s early death and her twenty years of work in hospice care, Eve Joseph utilizes history, religion, philosophy, literature, personal anecdote, mythology, poetry and pop culture to discern the unknowable and illuminate her travels through the land of the dying.

Eve Joseph’s work has been published in a number of Canadian and American journals and anthologies. Her poetry collections, The Startled Heart and The Secret Signature of Things, were both nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. She lives in Victoria, BC.
For more information on the BC Book Prizes, click here.

Westwood is pleased to announce that five of our authors have been nominated for the 2015 Arthur Ellis Award. Bestowed annually by the Crime Writers of Canada, these awards recognize the best in Canadian crime writing from the last year.

Best Novel:

Alen Mattich, Killing Pilgrim (House of Anansi)

Best Non-Fiction Book:

Charlotte Gray, The Massey Murder: A Maid, her Master and the Trial that Shocked a Country (HarperCollins)

Best First Novel:

Steve Burrows, Siege of Bitterns (Dundurn Press)

The Lou Allin Memorial Prize for the Arthur Ellis Novella Award:

Ian Hamilton, The Dragon Head of Hong Kong (House of Anansi)Elle Wild

Unhanged Arthur for Best Unpublished First Crime Novel:

Elle Wild, Strange Things Done

For more information on the Arthur Ellis Awards, visit CBC Books.

Kim Fu’s debut novel, For Today I Am a Boy, is a finalists for the 2015 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction. The award citation reads: “An unflinching observer of personal history, family history and beyond, Kim Fu writes with a pen as sharp and precise as a lancet. For Today I Am a Boy is a novel about gender, race, immigrant life, but it does not let itself be pigeon-holed, just as its protagonist refuses to be defined. A fiercely beautiful novel, the book is the perfect testimony to the fact that no one knows the last word about any human heart.”

For Today I Am a Boy is also the winner of the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction and shortlisted for the upcoming Lambda Literary Awards. The novel’s long list of accolades includes being chosen for McMaster University’s 2015 Common Reading Program and the Barnes & Noble ‘Discover Great New Writers’ program, being shortlisted for the Canadian Authors Association Emerging Writer Award, longlisted for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize and for Canada Reads 2015, and being named a New York Times Editor’s Choice. For Today I Am a Boy is published in Australia by Random House, in Canada by HarperCollins, and in the US by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

WCA would like to congratulate Bill Gaston, Katja Rudolph, Mark Sakamoto and Richard Wagamese, who have all been nominated for the OLA’s Evergreen Award.

The Evergreen Awards are run by the Ontario Library Association. Adults of any age vote for their favourite book of fiction or non-fiction by a living Canadian author.

For more information, please visit:

https://www.accessola.org/web/OLAWEB/Forest_of_Reading/Awards_Nominees/Evergreen_Nominees.aspx