WCA was devastated yesterday by the news that its beloved client Eric Hill had succumbed to his recent illness. Eric’s iconic character Spot launched the groundbreaking lift-the-flap book format back in 1980, and went on to delight children in more than 60 languages. Eric was a very special man and he will be greatly missed. Please share a Spot book with a child to keep his memory alive.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jun/10/spot-the-dog-eric-hill-dies -86
Congratulations to Susin Nielsen, who has just won the Red Maple Award for The Reluctant Journal of Henry K. Larsen (Tundra Books). She previously won the award in 2010 for Word Nerd.
The Ontario Library Association’s annual Red Maple Award was first presented in 1998. This award is open to Canadian authors writing at the Grade 7-8 level, who have been published within the last two years. The winner is selected by Ontario’s young readers.
WCA is pleased to announce that The Longer I’m Prime Minister: Stephen Harper and Canada 2006– by Paul Wells has won the John W. Dafoe Prize.
The J.W. Dafoe Book Prize is awarded to the best book on Canada, Canadians, and/or Canada’s place in the world published in the previous calendar year.
The Longer I’m Prime Minister is a national bestseller, a Maclean’s Best Book, and winner of the Writers’ Trust Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing.
The Jury citation follows:
“Paul Wells provides a lively, witty and perceptive insider, political portrait of Stephen Harper as a calculating, incremental politician, who set out to fundamentally change how Canadians see themselves and their place in the world. In his balanced analysis, Paul Wells has enhanced our understanding of a relatively new kind of Canadian conservatism that fiercely brands its opponents and operates in a permanent electoral mode.”
Congratulations Paul!
Congratulations to WCA author Paul Wells, who has won this year’s $25,000 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing for The Longer I’m Prime Minister: Stephen Harper and Canada, 2006- (Random House Canada).
The Writers’ Trust of Canada handed out the honour at a gala in Ottawa on the 2nd of April.
The jury praised his book as “Impeccably researched, gorgeously written and deeply insightful…an essential read for all political junkies.”
For more information, please visit:
http://www.writerstrust.com/awards/shaughnessy-cohen-prize-for-political-writing.aspx
Jury Citation
Veteran political columnist Paul Wells has crafted a fast-paced, romping great read about a Prime Minister who is frequently described by the Parliamentary Press Gallery as dull, plodding, and inscrutable. Though viscerally funny and often biting, this book is never partisan or unfair. Impeccably researched, gorgeously written, and deeply insightful, The Longer I’m Prime Minister is an essential read for all political junkies.
At a ceremony today in downtown Toronto, WCA author Thomas King was named the winner of The 2014 RBC Taylor Prize for his book The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America, published by Doubleday Canada.
Awarded annually in celebration of Canadian non-fiction, the prize celebrates a book that “best combines a superb command of the English language, an elegance of style, and a subtlety of thought and perception.”
The jury citation follows:
“Histories of North America’s Native Peoples abound, but few are as subversive, entertaining, well-researched, hilarious, enraging, and finally as hopeful as this very personal take on our long relationship with the “inconvenient” Indian. King dissects idealized myths (noble Hiawatha, servile Tonto, the Sixties nature guru) against the tragic backdrop of real Indians abused in mission schools, penned together on reserves, and bludgeoned by vicious or ham-fisted government policies. A sharp, informed eye is cast on Riel, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull, on the dark and tangled stories of Native land claims, on Alcatraz, Will Rogers (a Cherokee), and the maid on Land o’ Lakes butter; on Batoche, on Wounded Knee. In this thoughtful, irascible account, and in characteristically tricksterish mode, King presents a provocative alternative version of Canada’s heritage narrative.”
Last month, The Inconvenient Indian won the $40,000 BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction.
Please join us in celebrating this very special book and author.
For more information, please visit:
http://www.thecharlestaylorprize.ca/2014/winner_14.asp
Thomas King is represented by Jackie Kaiser.
The finalists were announced for the 26th annual Lambda Literary Awards, which honours LGBT books published in 2013, and WCA is happy to report that Ian Hamilton’s The Wild Beasts of Wuhan: An Ava Lee Novel was on the list. The winners will be announced in New York on June 2.
For more information, please visit:
February 25, 2014
Bruce Westwood is delighted to announce several changes taking place at Westwood Creative Artists.
Jackie Kaiser has been appointed to the position of President and Chief Operating Officer of Westwood Creative Artists, effective immediately. Jackie became a literary agent at Westwood Creative Artists in October 2000 following a decade at Penguin Books where she was Executive Editor. Her instincts, passion, work ethic, and above all her devotion to her writers have led to a distinguished career in Canadian book publishing that spans 30 years. She has spoken about editing, agenting and publishing at the Adelaide Festival of Writers and various universities in Canada. The writers she has nurtured have topped bestseller lists, been published in dozens of countries around the world, and won numerous awards including The Man Booker Prize, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Trillium Book Prize, the Hilary Weston Writers Trust Prize for Non-fiction, the RBC Taylor Prize, the Edna Staebler Award, and Marian Engel Award, and the BC National Prize for Nonfiction.
Hilary McMahon has been appointed to Executive Vice President of Westwood Creative Artists. Hilary joined Westwood Creative Artists in 1995 after earning a double major in journalism and English and working in public relations and the magazine industry. She spent a number of years as Bruce Westwood’s assistant before taking on her own clients, and was recognized early in her career in Quill & Quire’s “Ones to Watch” feature. She now represents a list of acclaimed, bestselling and prize-winning writers across diverse genres. She is particularly proud of her longstanding relationships with writers who came to her with unsolicited manuscripts, and have now enjoyed significant success in Canada, the US, and abroad. Her sensitivity, tenacity, intelligence and optimism are appreciated by clients, publishers, and colleagues alike. In addition to her responsibilities as an agent, Hilary is in charge of human resources at the agency and enjoys mentoring junior colleagues.
Jackie Kaiser and Hilary McMahon are both shareholders in Westwood Creative Artists.
Westwood Creative Artists was founded in 1995 by Bruce Westwood. With a client roster that boasts more than 400 authors, it is Canada’s largest literary agency, representing award-winning literary fiction, quality commercial fiction including mysteries and thrillers, critically acclaimed non-fiction in the areas of memoir, history, biography, science, journalism and current events, a select range of practical non-fiction, and choice titles for children and young adults.
Bruce Westwood will continue to act as Managing Director and CEO of the agency. Michael A. Levine will continue in his role as Chairman of Westwood Creative Artists.
Congratulations to Thomas King, who has won British Columbia’s National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction for The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America.
The jury, in its citation, called it a “wry, iconoclastic and important book that challenges us to think differently about both the past and the future.”
For more information, please visit:
The five finalists for the $25,000 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing have been announced, and we are thrilled that WCA authors Margaret MacMillan, Paul Wells and Graeme Smith made the list. The winner will be announced in Ottawa on April 2, 2014, at the Politics and the Pen Gala.
For more information, please visit:
Margaret MacMillan for The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914
Published by Allen Lane Canada
Graeme Smith for The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan,
Published by Knopf Canada
Paul Wells for The Longer I’m Prime Minister: Stephen Harper and Canada, 2006
Published by Random House Canada