FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 2000. All Rights Reserved

Bookends by Harry Vandervlist By the time you read this, a jury composed of Margaret Atwood, Alistair MacLeod and Jane Urquhart will have decided whether to award the $25,000 Giller Prize to Calgarian Fred Stenson. His nomination for the well-received novel The Trade places Stenson in pretty exalted company: his fellow nominees are Ian Cumyn, Elizabeth Hay, Michael Ondaatje, David Adams Richards and Eden Robinson. The announcement will be made today, November 2. The nomination is serious recognition for Stenson, a screenwriter (over 100 films and videos), fiction writer and humour columnist for AlbertaViews magazine. Stenson's 10 books include the story collections Teeth and Working Without a Laugh Track; the novels Lonesome Hero (which won the Canadian Authors Association Silver Medal for Fiction) and Last One Home; as well as several anthologies along with three non-fiction titles. Now a quarter-century tradition (plus one), the 26th annual Bob Edwards Luncheon takes place November 8 at the Palliser Hotel's Crystal Ballroom. Alberta Theatre Projects started the luncheon back in ’74 to honour Edwards, the editor of the Calgary Eye Opener newspaper way back at the turn of the century. Edwards was the kind of journalist who aimed to afflict the comfortable. What would he have made of present-day Calgary, where it's rare and certainly unpopular even to admit that anyone's uncomfortable here in Paradise-by-the-Bow? Apart from slightly-delayed drivers on the Deerfoot Trail, of course. Can it be called discomfort, the pain of people whose SUVs happen to cost more than double the annual income of many forgotten folks who subsidize our glorious provincial surplus by barely subsisting on cutback disability payments – to mention only them? This year the annual Bob Edwards award will go to novelist Guy Vanderhaeghe, author of The Englishman's Boy and Man Descending. Tickets are available by calling Bernadette at 294-7475. Roo Borson, Kim Maltman and Andy Patton – the Pain Not Bread Collective – will read at Pages on Wednesday, November 8 at 7:30 p.m. Seeking guidance for poets who live in dark days, the three writers look back to the Tang dynasty, one of the many cursedly interesting times in China's history. Poets like Wang Wei, Li Bai and Du Fu inspire their work, which trades in allusion, translation and echoes between Chinese and English. (Incidentally, if you recall how Roland Barthes met his demise, you know where the name of the collective came from.)

| Back To This Issue Table of Contents | Back To Main Index |