Congratulations to Joel Thomas Hynes whose novel, We’ll All Be Burnt in Our Beds Some Night, won the 2017 BMO Winterset Award!
The Award, which celebrates excellence in Newfoundland and Labrador writing, is composed of a partnership between the BMO Financial Group, ArtsNL, and the project’s founder, writer Richard Gwyn.
Lara Hinchberger of Penguin Canada has acquired, in a two book deal, Canadian English rights to internationally bestselling women’s fiction author Karma Brown’s (Come Away With Me, The Choices We Make, In This Moment) first foray into the domestic noir genre; RECIPE FOR A PERFECT WIFE. In which a reluctant, modern housewife, Alice, finds a cookbook buried in an old box in the basement of her new home and becomes captivated with the cookbook’s previous owner, a 1950s housewife, Nellie. Dissatisfied with her own life and losing her grip on reality one retro recipe at a time, Alice will decide—thanks to Nellie’s cookbook, the old house, and decades-long held secrets— how far she’s willing to go to get the life she wants. Penguin will publish RECIPE FOR A PERFECT WIFE as a Viking title in February 2019. The deal was arranged by Carolyn Forde at Westwood Creative Artists.
Editor-in-Chief of McClelland & Stewart and Doubleday Canada Martha Kanya-Forstner has acquired Canadian rights to two-time Giller Prize-winner M.G. Vassanji’s new novel, tentatively titled A DELHI OBSESSION, and a collection of short stories tentatively titled WHAT ARE YOU. A DELHI OBSESSION, brimming with emotional tension, tells the stories of Munir Khan and Mohini Singh as they begin a fraught, torrid affair despite their moral and political differences. Publication of the novel is planned for fall 2019. Bruce Westwood of Westwood Creative Artists arranged the deal.
We are thrilled for Mark Sakamoto and his book Forgiveness, winner of the 2018 Canada Reads debates. The book which originally published in 2014 and was shortlisted for the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction, is in its eighth week on the bestseller list since being nominated. Sakamoto’s recent win has led to renewed interest including coverage in the National Post and Maclean’s.
Congratulations Mark – we are so proud to have you here at Westwood Creative Artists!
Author and photographer Nancy Rose was featured on The Weather Network! Click here for a behind-the-scenes look at how she captures pictures of the cute little critters in her Squirrels book series. Her newest book The Secret Life of Squirrels: Back to School! will be available this summer.
Elaine “Lainey” Lui of CTV’s “The Social” and founder and editor of LaineyGossip.com, personally revealed the cover of Raziel Reid’s YA novel Kens on her namesake blog. Lui, who represented Reid’s first book When Everything Feels Like the Movies on CBC’s Canada Reads 2015, took the opportunity to share her appreciation of his latest work, “This is a story of identity and acceptance and, like all of Raziel’s work, it’s funny and provocative and deeply disturbing… because don’t we all wear masks? Don’t we all borrow faces?”
Kens will be available September 2018.
Congratulations to acclaimed YA author Susan Juby on making the Young Adult Library Services Association’s list of 2018 Best Fiction for Young Adults with her newest title, The Fashion Committee. Since publishing in 2017 the novel has earned positive reviews from Quill & Quire and the Toronto Star, and received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Horn Book Magazine, and School Library Journal. The Globe and Mail said, “Like all Juby novels, this one is sparkling verbose and self-deprecating … This one is tailored to perfection for readers who love to laugh and look good doing it.”
The Funeral, Matt James’ debut children’s book as illustrator and author, has racked up five starred reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, School Library Journal, Booklist, and Shelf Awareness.
“James uniquely and playfully captures the particularities of a child’s perspective” –Booklist
The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore, from award-winning author Kim Fu, has garnered positive reviews since publishing in February of this year. See below for quotes from Quill & Quire, The Stranger and, The New York Times.
Not only did Sakura’s Cherry Blossoms from author Robert Paul Weston and illustrator Misa Saburi get a starred review on Booklist, it was featured as the Review of the Day on their homepage for January 22, 2018!
Stacey Matson follows up her acclaimed, internationally-published Life of a Total Genius trilogy with a new standalone middle grade novel, THE CONFIDENTIAL COOPER FILE, about a boy who believes his grandfather, disappearing into Alzheimer’s, is actually the infamous – and never caught – hijacker DB Cooper, and sets out to prove it, to Anne Shone at Scholastic Canada for publication in fall 2019 (world excluding US) by Hilary McMahon at Westwood Creative Artists.
