WCA is thrilled to announce that Richard Gwyn’s bestselling biography of Sir John A. Macdonald has won the $25,000 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing at a ceremony in Ottawa on Wednesday night.

Nation Maker is “a fully rounded and compelling portrait of our first prime minister’s public and private life,” according to the Cohen prize citation. “Gwyn shows how Macdonald built a nation out of a reluctant union of impoverished colonies, and shaped the Canada we know today.”

For more information, please visit:

http://www.writerstrust.com/Awards/Shaughnessy-Cohen-Prize-for-Political-Writing.aspx

WCA is happy to announce that Richard Gwyn’s Nation Maker: Sir John A. Macdonald, His Life, Our Times has won this year’s J.W. Dafoe Book Prize.

The Winnipeg-based Dafoe prize is given each year to a non-fiction title about Canadian public affairs.
For more information, please visit:

http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/arts-and-life/entertainment/books/richard-gwyn-wins-jw-dafoe-book-prize-147880295.html

Riel Nason’s debut novel The Town That Drowned has been declared a finalist for the 2012 Commonwealth Book Prize. Since its release in the Fall of 2011, The Town That Drowned has been a critical and commercial hit. Riel’s novel has also been nominated for the Atlantic Book Publishers Association’s Margaret and John Savage First Book Award and the Canadian Library Association Young Adult Book Award.

Regional winners will be announced May 24, and the overall winner will be announced at the Hay Festival, Wales in the UK, on Friday, June 8.

WCA is happy to announce that I Shall Not Hate by Izzeldin Abuelaish, has just won a Christopher Award. The ceremony will be held in New York on May 24. For more information, please visit: www.christophers.org

WCA is very pleased to announce that Leslie Beck’s Longevity Diet: The Power of Food to Slow Aging and Maintain Optimal Health and Energy has been nominated for the 2012 Taste Canada Awards in the category Culinary Narratives.

A shortlist will be announced on August 1, 2012. For more information about the awards and this year’s nominees, please visit http://tastecanada.org/.

WCA is happy to announce that Cathy Ostlere’s Karma has been named a CLA 2012 Young Adult Book Award Honour Book.

David Bergen’s The Matter with Morris (HarperCollins Canada) has been shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

Bergen’s novel is the only Canadian title in the running for the prize, which awards 100,000 British pounds to the winner, and is billed as “the world’s most valuable annual literary award for a single work of fiction published in English.”

The Matter with Morris, Bergen’s sixth novel, about a middle-aged man whose son is killed in Afghanistan, made the short list for the 2010 Scotiabank Giller Prize. Bergen won the Giller in 2005 for the novel The Time in Between, which was also longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin award. His new novel, The Age of Hope, will be published by HarperCollins Canada in the fall.

For more information, please visit: http://www.impacdublinaward.ie/

All of us at Westwood Creative Artists are deeply saddened by the passing of Josef Skvorecky. We have been honoured to represent an author of his calibre, integrity and standing.

To learn more about Mr. Skvorecky, please visit the following pages:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/giant-of-czech-literature-came-to-canada-after-1968-soviet-crackdown/article2291297/singlepage/#articlecontent

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/05/arts/josef-skvorecky-czech-born-writer-dies-at-87.html

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/books/josef-skvorecky-a-writer-between-two-worlds/article2291370/

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/editorials/skvorecky-and-havel-engineers-of-human-freedom/article2290374/

http://arts.nationalpost.com/2012/01/03/the-life-of-josef-skvorecky-a-testament-to-the-power-of-the-written-word-the-futility-of-censorship/

WCA is happy to announce that Ian Brown’s The Boy in the Moon has been named a Cleveland Plain Dealer Best Book of 2011. For more information, please visit:

http://www.cleveland.com/books/index.ssf/2011/12/best_books_of_2011_the_top_10.html

Bad Animals: A Father’s Accidental Education in Autism, by Joel Yanofsky, has been shortlisted for the 2012 BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction. Founded in 2004, the BC Award is one of the largest non-fiction book prizes in the country.

For more information, please visit:

http://www.bcachievement.com/nonfiction/finalists.php