The Book Publishers Association of Alberta has announced its 2019 Alberta Book Publishing Awards Shortlist and we’re thrilled to see Keith Maillard’s Twin Studies made the cut!

From the Publisher:

“Twin Studies is a masterful novel that explores the complicated bonds between twins and siblings, friends and lovers; the role of class and money; and the nature of gender and sexuality. It’s a novel with characters who are real, their relationships a rich world that readers will thoroughly lose themselves in. No other contemporary novel so deftly explores the intersection between our inner lives and our public lives — that ‘we’re not what people see.'”

Wonderful news for Victoria, B.C., poet Eve Joseph, the Canadian winner of the 2019 Griffin Poetry Prize for her collection Quarrels. Joseph was presented with the $65,000 prize – the most lucrative in the country for poetry – at a gala ceremony in Toronto on June 6.

Congratulations to Governor General Literary Award-winning author Susin Nielsen, whose touching and funny middle-grade story No Fixed Address has won the 2019 IODE Violet Downey Book Award.

Her previous titles include YA reads We Are All Made of Molecules and Optimists Die First, her endearing picture book Princess Puffybottom . . . and Darryl and more.

We’re delighted to share that WCA author’s Susin Nielsen and Tiffany Stone have been shortlisted for the 2020 Chocolate Lily Book Awards! Nielsen’s No Fixed Address is a finalist in the Novel Category (Grades 4-7) and Stone’s Tree Song illustrated by Holly Hatam, is a finalist in the Picture Book category.

Created in 2002, the Chocolate Lily Book Awards strives to increase literacy for grade school children in British Columbia while celebrating BC authors and illustrators.

Kent Monkman, a Cree artists widely known for his provocative interventions into Western European and American art history, has been selected to create two monumental paintings for The Met’s Great Hall. Mistikôsiwak (Wooden Boat People) will run from December 19, 2019 to April 12, 2020.

This installation is part of a new series of contemporary activations at The Met in which the Museum invites artists to create new works of art inspired by the collection, establishing a dialogue between the commissioned works, the collection, the space, and audiences.

Sarah Atkinson of Tyndale has acquired world rights to Ottawa-based editor of Faith Today Karen Stiller’s THE MINISTER’S WIFE, an insightful, moving and often humorous memoir that explores balancing expectations and crises of all kinds including those of faith in her role as a minister’s spouse with her own identity and path to self-fulfillment. Hilary McMahon of Westwood Creative Artists negotiated with deal, with publication slated for spring 2020.

Gail Anderson-Dargatz’s THE CURE FOR DEATH BY LIGHTNING, to Partizanska knjiga (Serbia), by Vuk Perisic at PLIMA Literary Agency, on behalf of Meg Wheeler of Westwood Creative Artists for Jackie Kaiser.

Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson’s EMPTY PLANET: THE SHOCK OF GLOBAL POPULATION DECLINE, to Les Arènes (France), by Anna Jarota at Anna Jarota Agency; and to JP Sluzbeni glasnik (Serbia), by Vuk Perisic at PLIMA Literary Agency, on behalf of Meg Wheeler of Westwood Creative Artists for John Pearce.

Yann Martel’s BEATRICE & VIRGIL, to Alatoran (Azerbaijan), by Meg Wheeler of Westwood Creative Artists for Jackie Kaiser.

Yann Martel’s LIFE OF PI audio rights, to Planeta/Destino (Spain), by Sandra Bruna at Sandra Bruna Agency, on behalf of Meg Wheeler of Westwood Creative Artists for Jackie Kaiser.

Josef Škvorecký’s THE BASS SAXOPHONE radio rights, to Radio Literatura (Poland), by Tomasz Bereziński at Graal Literary Agency, on behalf of Meg Wheeler of Westwood Creative Artists.

Richard Wagamese’s INDIAN HORSE and MEDICINE WALK, to Blessing Verlag (Germany), by Hannah Fosh at Liepman Agency, on behalf of Meg Wheeler of Westwood Creative Artists for John Pearce.

We are thrilled for authors Tasha Spillet and David A. Robertson, both 2019 Manitoba Book Award Winners. Spillet took home the Manitoba Indigenous Writer of the Year Award, presented to an Indigenous writer who demonstrates excellence in writing and engagement in work that supports and encourages Indigenous writing in Manitoba. Robertson, who was also a finalist for the Writer of the Year Award, received the McNally Robinson Book for Young People Award for Monsters, the second book in his YA trilogy.

Congratulations to the 2019/2020 finalists for the Hackmatack Children’s Choice Book Awards including, The Ice Chips and the Haunted Hurricane, the second book in the Ice Chips series from father-daughter writing duo Roy and Kerry MacGregor, and Susin Nielsen’s middle-grade story, No-Fixed Address.

The 2019-2020 shortlist will be promoted at this year’s ceremony on May 31st at the Halifax Central Library. The shortlisted books will then be read in the 2019-2020 school year by thousands of children in the Atlantic region. Young readers will vote for their favourite book, and four winners will be announced at the Hackmatack Awards Ceremony in May 2020.

Margaret Atwood has selected Barbara Gowdy’s novel, The White Bone, as the inaugural title for The Globe and Mail‘s book club. Subscribers are invited to discuss the book in an online forum in response to a weekly discussion question. The book club will culminate in a live event where Atwood will interview Barbara Gowdy at the Globe and Mail Centre on May 24.

First published in 1998, Quill & Quire said of the national bestseller, “With writing that manages to be both incisive and hallucinogenic, and that is born along by a moral vision and a deftly controlled sense of outrage, Gowdy has created a landscape, a cosmology, and a community that are wholly surprising and believable. The White Bone is a singular and remarkable novel.”