Prize watch: The Baileys Prize for Women’s Fiction 2015 long list came out today – and it includes CanLit!! Yay! You already know how much I liked Heather O’Neill’s The Girl Who Was Saturday Night and loved Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven. Oh yeah, it includes 18 other books that look good, too!
Category: Prizes
Prize Jury Wannabe: Canada Reads 2015
Remember when I said I wasn’t going to read the Canada Reads finalists this year? Of course I read the Canada Reads finalists this year. Continue reading
Lammys 2015
Prize watch: The finalists for the 27th annual Lambda Awards were announced this week. The Lammys celebrate and recognize excellence in LGBT literature published during the year. Congrats especially to the Canadian finalists!
Taylor Prize 2015
Prize watch: Congrats to Plum Johnson, winner of the 2015 RBC Taylor Prize for her memoir They Left Us Everything. Haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but it looks like a good one.
Folio Prize 2015
Prize watch: Yesterday, the eight finalists for the Folio Prize were announced. HUGE congrats to Canadian Miriam Toews, as All My Puny Sorrows made it to the short list and very deservedly so. It’s an impressive list of finalists; I recommend 10:04 and will definitely be reading a few others!
NBCC Awards 2014
Prize watch: The 30 finalists (five finalists in six categories) for the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Awards were announced this week. I’m interested to see what happens in the fiction category – a few of these are on my wish list. (The one I did read, Lila, I thought was “meh.”)
Canada Reads finalist announcement 2015
Who doesn’t love a good book debate?! Canada Reads 2015 is coming up.
I’m not enamoured with these finalists though. Ru and The Inconvenient Indian are both very good. But the other three aren’t all that appealing to me, so maybe I won’t bother reading all five finalists this year. Overall it’s not an outstanding crop, like last year’s was.
There were a couple of books on the long list that I would have liked to read, and I was hoping those would make the cut so I’d have an excuse. Maybe I’ll just read them instead!
IMPAC Dublin 2015
Prize watch: Wow, the long list for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award really does live up to its name! There are 142 books nominated – 11 of them by Canadians. I suppose when you are the richest literary prize in the world (€100,000) you can have the longest long list. Continue reading
NBA 2014
Prize watch: (November 19 update) Congrats to Phil Klay, winner of the National Book Award for fiction for Redeployment. The book is outstanding! I think the National Book Award shortlist may be the best one of all the 2014 awards. I have three more of the finalists here waiting for me to read them, and the last one is on my wish list. Also congrats to Ursula K. Le Guin, who was presented with the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Foundation. Continue reading
GG Awards 2014
Prize watch: (update November 19) Congrats to ALL the winners of the Governor General’s Literary Awards, including Thomas King for his novel The Back of the Turtle, and Michael Harris for his non-fiction work The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection. I might add both to my wish list of books to possibly read someday. I’ve never read any of King’s fiction, though I did enjoy The Inconvenient Indian. And The End of Absence sounds intriguing, like it will further fuel my love/hate relationship with the interwebs. Continue reading