| Paul Anderson’s Hunger’s Brides, a doorstopper of a historical novel set in Mexico and Calgary and a decade in the writing, walked off with the Georges Bugnet Award for this year’s best novel at the Alberta Book Awards on May 14.
Anderson wasn’t the only local writer to pick up a prize. Walter Hildebrandt received the Stephan G. Stephansson poetry award for Where the Land Gets Broken, while actor-playwright Karen Hines, a.k.a. Pochsy, grabbed the Gwen Pharis Ringwood Award for Drama for her collection The Pochsy Plays.
Hildebrandt had plenty to celebrate – the director of the University of Calgary Press also saw his imprint win the awards for best scholarly book (Simon M. Evans’s The Bar U & Canadian Ranching History) and book cover design (The Garden of Art, designed by Mieka West).
Edmonton journalist Mark Lisac was the winner of the Wilfred Eggleston Award for Non-fiction for his election-year best-seller Alberta Politics Uncovered. The University of Alberta Press was crowned Publisher of the Year. The annual book awards are given out by the Writers Guild of Alberta and the Book Publishers Association of Alberta.
Children’s book authors aside, there aren’t that many writers around anymore who mix up their words with visuals. William Blake used his paintings to illuminate his mystical religious poetry. Günter Grass still has a predilection for drawing intricate rats and flounders. But by and large the two worlds seem to like their separate domains, and aside from the odd nifty jacket, there aren’t a lot of books these days to inspire the eye as well as the mind.
That said, the Triangle Gallery of Visual Arts seems to have no problem mixing the two worlds. It’s serving up a night of poetry and art on Thursday, May 19 at 7 p.m. The readers are local performance poets the Single Onion group, and include Jordan Scott (exploring the poetry of stuttering), Kirk Miles (a founding member of One Yellow Rabbit), Terrance Cox (winner of the Canadian Authors ‘Association annual poetry contest) and singer-songwriter Megan Emmett.
Canadian fiction seems to divide itself between the rugged Prairie novel and the, well, rugged East Coast novel. Newfoundland has a tradition of great writers, including David French and Alistair Macleod, and you can now add Donna Morrissey to the list. If you’re one of the many who read her prize-winning Kit’s Law, you’ll want to check out her new novel, Sylvanus Now. She further explores her native eastern terrain, this time with the story of a Newfoundland fishing community in the 1950s. Hear her read from the novel at Pages on Tuesday, May 24 at 7:30 p.m.
The Imaginasian 2005 Asian Writers’ Showcase is drawing a crowd of talent for its last instalment, held in conjunction with last week’s launch of Red Silk. The event is being hosted by Larissa Lai (Salt Fish Girl) and features Wayson Choy (All That Matters), Hiromi Goto (Chorus of Mushrooms), Shree Ghatage (Brahma’s Dream) and Mieko Ouchi (The Red Priest). It’s on Wednesday, May 25 at 7 p.m and please note that, while the event is presented by McNally Robinson, it is being held in the W.R. Castell Central Library’s John Dutton Theatre.
Andrew Pyper’s Lost Girls was one of the best thrillers in recent years, in part due to the fact that it was indebted as much to contemporary metafiction writers like John Fowles as it was to straight crime fiction. His new novel The Wildfire Season has been acquiring its own buzz, with a creepy story of a disfigured fire chief that just might be losing his mind. He’ll be reading from the novel on Wednesday, May 25 at 7 p.m. at McNally Robinson.
If you read Jon Krakauer’s last book Under the Banner of Heaven, you may have been as incredibly disappointed as I was. I won’t launch into a discussion of that book here; suffice it to say that Debbie Palmer’s memoir Keep Sweet: Children of Polygamy looks like it may offer readers what Krakauer’s book lacked. Co-written with Dave Perrin, it recalls Palmer’s life as the oldest of 47 children (not a typo), who became the sixth wife of a Mormon leader at age 15. She reads from her work on Thursday, May 26 at 7 p.m., also at McNally Robinson.
Best-sellers
Best-selling books for May 9 to 15 at Pages on Kensington
Fiction and Poetry
1. Garbage Head
by Christopher Willard
2. Here Is Where We Meet
by John Berger
3. The Mapmaker's Opera
by Bea Gonzalez
4. Thirty-seven Small Songs & Thirteen Silences
by Jan Zwicky
5. Hot Poppies
by Leon Rooke
6. The Da Vinci Code
by Dan Brown
7. Sweetness in the Belly
by Camilla Gibb
8. Three Day Road
by Joseph Boyden
9. Never Let Me Go
by Kazuo Ishiguro
10. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
by Jonathan Safran Foer
Non-fiction
1. A Short History of Progress
by Ronald Wright
2. Freakonomics
by Steven Levitt
3. Suppertime Survival
by Lynn Roblin and Bev Callaghan
4. Blink
by Malcolm Gladwell
5. Lilac Moon
by Sharon Butala
6. Terry
by Douglas Coupland
7. The Friar and the Cipher
by Lawrence Goldstone
8. No Time: Stress and the Crisis of Modern Life
by Heather Menzies
9. Romancing the Rockies
by Brian Brennan
10. The Instant Cook
by Donna Hay |
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