Wow, didn’t see that one coming! I don’t think tons of people did, if the Twitter is to be believed. Big congrats to Sean Michaels, winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize for Us Conductors.
Writers’ Trust 2014
Prize watch: (November 10 update) I’m a little slow on reporting this one… congrats to Miriam Toews, winner of the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize for All My Puny Sorrows. It’s excellent – give it a read! Continue reading
Prize Jury Wannabe: Giller 2014
What are you doing with your extra hour today? I’m using mine to start this blog post!
I took a break from Reading Bingo this month to catch up on some CanLit. I finished 14 books in October – including all six Scotiabank Giller Prize finalists, with eight days to spare before the big event and one day to spare before the Between the Pages event featuring all the authors. (I was lucky to have some actual vacation time – as opposed to the more frequent notional type, where I intend to take time off and then give in to my always-expanding inbox and just end up working anyway.)
Tough call on the Giller this year! Usually there’s one book that I feel is far and away the best. (Usually it doesn’t win.) This year I was really impressed by three of them, and am still waffling between giving them 4 and 5 stars. Continue reading
TBA 2014
Prize watch: I get very happy when a book I loved receives an award! Congrats to Charlotte Gray, who just won the Toronto Book Award for The Massey Murder: A Maid, Her Master and the Trial that Shocked a Country.
Hilary Weston Non-Fiction 2014
Prize watch: Congrats to Naomi Klein, winner of this year’s Hilary Weston Writer’s Trust Prize for Non-Fiction for her book This Changes Everything.
(September 18) Also announced yesterday, the five finalists for the 2014 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Non-Fiction.
Booker prize 2014
Prize watch: (October 14 update) We have a winner! Congrats to Richard Flanagan, who was awarded the 2014 Man Booker prize for his book The Narrow Road to the Deep North, a P.O.W. story about an Australian surgeon forced to work on the Thailand-Burma Railway. Sounds like a good read. Continue reading
Nobel Prize 2014
Prize watch: Congrats to Patrick Modiano, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2014. Never heard of him. Seems I’m not alone, though: according to this article in The Guardian, “Modiano is well known in France but something of an unknown quantity for even widely read people in other countries.” His work sounds like stuff I would like though, so maybe I’ll give one of his books a try, assuming they’ve been translated to English.
bigpileofbooks
THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU LET ME LOOSE IN A BOOKSTORE
Giller Prize 2014 short list
Prize watch: Big day today… the Scotiabank Giller Prize short list was just announced. Congrats to all the finalists! The award ceremony is on November 10, so that gives me 35 days to read:
- The Betrayers, by David Bezmozgis
- Tell, by Frances Itani
- Us Conductors, by Sean Michaels
- The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, by Heather O’Neill
- All My Puny Sorrows, by Miriam Toews
- The Ever After of Ashwin Rao, by Padma Viswanathan
Think I’ll be able to do it? Better yet, who’s with me?!
