Westwood is proud to announce that Elizabeth Renzetti, Kim Fu, Ghalib Islam, and Steve Burrows have been nominated for the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize!

The annual award, designed to kick-start the careers of debut authors, will award a $10,000 CAD cash prize to a book in each of three categories: Literary Fiction, Genre Fiction (beginning with Mystery this year), and Non-Fiction.

Our authors have been nominated in the following categories:

Literary Fiction

• Based on a True Story by Elizabeth Renzetti – House of Anansi Press
• For Today I Am a Boy by Kim Fu – HarperCollins Canada
• Fire In The Unnameable Country by Ghalib Islam – Penguin Canada

Fiction (Mystery)

• A Siege of Bitterns: A Birder Murder Mystery by Steve Burrows – Dundurn

The shortlist, selected by Kobo’s team of booksellers and taking into consideration book completion rates, customer ratings and reviews, comprises five books in each genre. The shortlist will now move on to the final selection process, led by top Canadian authors: Charlotte Gray for Non-Fiction, Miriam Toews for Literary Fiction, and Ian Hamilton for Genre Fiction (Mystery), with winners announced on July 7.

For the complete shortlist, click here.

The winners of the 2015 BC Book Prizes have been announced and Eve Joseph has won the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize!

Joseph’s book, In the Slender Margin: The Intimate Strangeness of Death and Dying (HarperCollins Canada), is part memoir, part meditation, and explores death from an “insider’s” point of view. Using the threads of her brother’s early death and her twenty years of work in hospice care, Eve Joseph utilizes history, religion, philosophy, literature, personal anecdote, mythology, poetry and pop culture to discern the unknowable and illuminate her travels through the land of the dying.

Eve Joseph’s work has been published in a number of Canadian and American journals and anthologies. Her poetry collections, The Startled Heart and The Secret Signature of Things, were both nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. She lives in Victoria, BC.
For more information on the BC Book Prizes, click here.

Westwood is pleased to announce that five of our authors have been nominated for the 2015 Arthur Ellis Award. Bestowed annually by the Crime Writers of Canada, these awards recognize the best in Canadian crime writing from the last year.

Best Novel:

Alen Mattich, Killing Pilgrim (House of Anansi)

Best Non-Fiction Book:

Charlotte Gray, The Massey Murder: A Maid, her Master and the Trial that Shocked a Country (HarperCollins)

Best First Novel:

Steve Burrows, Siege of Bitterns (Dundurn Press)

The Lou Allin Memorial Prize for the Arthur Ellis Novella Award:

Ian Hamilton, The Dragon Head of Hong Kong (House of Anansi)Elle Wild

Unhanged Arthur for Best Unpublished First Crime Novel:

Elle Wild, Strange Things Done

For more information on the Arthur Ellis Awards, visit CBC Books.

Kim Fu’s debut novel, For Today I Am a Boy, is a finalists for the 2015 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction. The award citation reads: “An unflinching observer of personal history, family history and beyond, Kim Fu writes with a pen as sharp and precise as a lancet. For Today I Am a Boy is a novel about gender, race, immigrant life, but it does not let itself be pigeon-holed, just as its protagonist refuses to be defined. A fiercely beautiful novel, the book is the perfect testimony to the fact that no one knows the last word about any human heart.”

For Today I Am a Boy is also the winner of the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction and shortlisted for the upcoming Lambda Literary Awards. The novel’s long list of accolades includes being chosen for McMaster University’s 2015 Common Reading Program and the Barnes & Noble ‘Discover Great New Writers’ program, being shortlisted for the Canadian Authors Association Emerging Writer Award, longlisted for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize and for Canada Reads 2015, and being named a New York Times Editor’s Choice. For Today I Am a Boy is published in Australia by Random House, in Canada by HarperCollins, and in the US by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

WCA would like to congratulate Bill Gaston, Katja Rudolph, Mark Sakamoto and Richard Wagamese, who have all been nominated for the OLA’s Evergreen Award.

The Evergreen Awards are run by the Ontario Library Association. Adults of any age vote for their favourite book of fiction or non-fiction by a living Canadian author.

For more information, please visit:

https://www.accessola.org/web/OLAWEB/Forest_of_Reading/Awards_Nominees/Evergreen_Nominees.aspx

This fall, CBC Books asked Canadians for their suggestions of books to change perspectives, challenge stereotypes and illuminate issues. What is the one book to break barriers? That’s the question host Wab Kinew will be asking for the 14th edition of CBC’s battle of the books.

WCA is thrilled that Kamal Al-Solaylee, Kim Fu, Thomas King and Doug Saunders have all been longlisted for CBC’s Canada Reads 2015.

The final five books and their champions will be revealed on January 20, 2015.

For more information, please visit:

http://www.cbc.ca/books/2014/12/the-canada-reads-2015-longlist.html

The 2015 finalists for the BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction –  one of the largest non-fiction book prizes in the country – were announced, and WCA is thrilled that James Raffan’s Circling the Midnight Sun: Culture and Change in the Invisible Arctic has been shortlisted. The award carries a prize of $40,000. Raffan’s jury citation follows:

James Raffan’s Circling the Midnight Sun fully deserves recognition as a book that encourages important national conversations and expands our shared knowledge of the increasingly complex world we inhabit. Circling the Midnight Sun tells the compelling story of those who are most affected by climate change. Raffan takes us on a journey through some of the worlds’ northernmost communities, from Iceland to Russia to Canada, and places in between. The Globe and Mail cited Circling the Midnight Sun as “a valuable opportunity to hear from the most vulnerable, but also the most resilient, residents of our planet. Far from being a cry of anger from a remote land, their message speaks to all of us who live with a changing climate that could soon mean big changes in our culture, too.”

For more information on the award and this year’s finalists, please visit www.bcachievement.com.

Please join us in congratulating Ashley Little and Ailsa Kay, who were both longlisted for the 2015 International IMPAC DUBLIN Literary Award. The €100,000 award is the richest literary prize in the world. Administered by Dublin City Public Libraries, books are nominated by libraries from around the world.

For more information about the prize, please visit:

http://www.impacdublinaward.ie/

For more information about the nominated titles, please click below:

WCA is thrilled to announce that Thomas King’s The Back of the Turtle (HarperCollins Canada) has won the 2014 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction.

The Back of the Turtle is King’s first literary novel in 15 years and follows on the success of the award-winning and bestselling The Inconvenient Indian and his beloved Green Grass, Running Water and Truth and Bright Water, both of which continue to be taught in Canadian schools and universities. Green Grass, Running Water is widely considered a contemporary Canadian classic.

The Governor General’s Literary Awards were first awarded in 1936, and are now one of Canada’s premier national literary awards. Winners will be celebrated at a public event in Ottawa on November 26.

http://ggbooks.ca/~/media/ggbooks/list%20of%20all%20winners%20english.pdf