We are pleased to announce that the feature-film adaptation of the late Richard Wagamese’s popular novel, Indian Horse, has won two key audience awards. The film was awarded the Vancouver International Film Festival Super Channel People’s Choice Award and the Calgary International Film Festival‘s award for Audience Favourite, Narrative Feature. To read more click here and here.

Congratulations to 2017 Governor General’s Literary Awards shortlisters Joel Thomas Hynes and Matt James. We’ll All Be Burnt in Our Beds Some Night from multidisciplinary award-winning artist Hynes has been nominated in the Fiction category. When the Moon Comes, illustrated by painter, musician and past Governor General’s Award winner Matt James, is nominated in the Illustrated Books category.

The winners will be announced November 1, 2017.

Bill Gaston’s most recent collection of short stories, A Mariner’s Guide to Self Sabotage, received a thoughtful review in The Globe and Mail. His writing is praised as, “so clean and self-effacing that it is remarkably easy to overlook the careful technique behind it.” The article goes on to say, the collection “is further proof – as though any further proof were necessary – of Bill Gaston’s surpassing mastery of the short-story form.” Read the article here.

We’re excited about the buzz David Chariandy’s long awaited second novel Brother has garnered. The Globe and Mail says Brother, “is a celebration and a reckoning, a study of community and of family and of the ways each relies on the other, and of the power of art to build and the ability of those in power to destroy.” To read the full article, click here.

Congratulations to David Chariandy, whose long awaited second novel Brother is shortlisted for the 2017 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.

The Writers’ Trust Awards is made possible through generous support from corporate, foundation, and individual sponsors. Partners CBC Books, The Globe and Mail, and Indigo provide additional support. The project is partially funded by the Government of Canada through the Department of Canadian Heritage. The winner will be announced on November 14.

Westwood Creative Artists is pleased to congratulate Trevor Herriot, winner of the 2017 Cheryl and Henry Kloppenburg Award for Literary Excellence for his body of work. The award-winning author and naturalist has published five books, including Globe and Mail bestseller Grass, Sky Song, Governor General’s Award shortlisted Jacob’s Wound and most recently, Towards a Prairie Atonement.

The jury said, “Trevor Herriot takes as his subject matter the land we live on and live off, that which our modern society, blinded by colonial arrogance and corporate greed, has so sought to dominate and push into the background, to our loss, personal and collective. With wisdom and grace, with a head for facts but a poet’s heart, with an attention to scientific detail yet a willingness to soar into the transcendental, with a voice that is personal but has a universal resonance, Herriot tells us that natural history — those birds, that river — is our history, that we cannot escape it, nor should we want to. He seeks to bring us back to a sound relationship with the land, and succeeds in ways that are moving and memorable. In awarding the 2017 Kloppenburg Award to Trevor Herriot, we heartily agree with the judgement of one critic: that he is the pre-eminent prairie naturalist of his generation.”

The Cheryl and Henry Kloppenburg Award for Literary Excellence recognizes Saskatchewan writers who have written a substantial body of literary work and had a significant impact on writing in Saskatchewan. The prize consists of an award of $10,000 donated by Cheryl and Henry Kloppenburg and a framed print of a work of art by Saskatchewan artist Dorothy Knowles.

Karen Connelly discusses her latest novel on CBC’s The Next Chapter with Shelagh Rogers. “I decided one day to just write something that made me happy,” Connelly says of The Change Room in which she tackles love, lust, and sex. Listen to the full interview here.

We are delighted to announce Kyo Maclear’s Birds Art Life and James Maskalyk’s Life on the Ground Floor are both shortlisted for this year’s Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction.

The Prize celebrates the best in Canadian nonfiction writing, from history to biography, essay to memoir, and commentary to criticism. The prize winner will be revealed November 14th.

In this positive review from the Toronto Star, Robert Wiersema writes, “A Mariner’s Guide to Self Sabotage serves as a potent reminder that Gaston is one of the finest writers of the short story at work in this country today. And even that is likely selling him short.” See the full review here.