| The short list for this year’s 2006 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize has been announced for best and first book. Regional winners go on to compete for the overall prize, which will be announced in Melbourne, Australia on Tuesday, March 14. The list for best book in the Canada-Caribbean region consists of Robert Antoni for Carnival, Rabindranath Maharaj for A Perfect Pledge, Lisa Moore for Alligator, Donna Morrissey for Sylvanus Now, Edeet Ravel for A Wall of Light and Jane Urquhart for A Map of Glass. The list for best first book includes Calgary writer Jacqueline Honnet for her short-story collection Limbo. She’s in competition with Howard Akler for The City Man, George Elliott Clarke for George & Rue, Marlon James for John Crow’s Devil and Mark McWatt for Suspended Sentences.
In other awards, this year’s Newbery Medal went to Lynne Rae Perkins’s children’s novel of growing up in a small town, Criss Cross. Hilary Spurling won the Whitbread award for biography and book of the year for the second volume in her study on Matisse. She was joined by Ali Smith, who won in the novel category for The Accidental; Tash Aw, in the best first novel category, for The Harmony Silk Factory; Kate Thompson, in the children’s literature designation, for The New Policeman; and Christopher Logue, who took the poetry award for Cold Calls.
Irish-American author Frank McCourt (Angela’s Ashes) comes to Calgary on Monday, February 6 to present his new memoir, Teacher Man, recalling his time spent as a high school teacher in New York. The event is hosted by Pages on Kensington, but will be held in the John Dutton Theatre at the W.R. Castell Central Library downtown. The reading starts at 7:30 p.m., with tickets available at Pages.
The next evening, Tuesday, February 7 at 7:30 p.m., Maggie MacDonald (who also plays in The Hidden Cameras and The Republic of Safety) comes to Pages to present her new work, Kill the Robot.
University of Calgary professor Christine Wiesenthal gives two readings this week in conjunction with her new biography, The Half-Lives of Pat Lowther, which traces the life and legacy of the poet, who was murdered by her husband in 1975. Wiesenthal will speak on Friday, February 3 at noon on the U of C campus in Social Sciences room 1339, as well as read at McNally Robinson on Thursday, February 2 at 7 p.m.
The latest news from the James Frey controversy in the U.S. is that Oprah Winfrey has changed tack and is now denouncing Frey’s memoir, A Million Little Pieces, which she originally touted on her book club, then defended against charges last month that Frey had falsified or exaggerated some of the book’s claims. Winfrey had Frey on her show last week, with the sputtering author admitting to more falsity, including the jail term he didn’t serve ("detailed" in his new "memoir," My Friend Leonard). As for me, I stand by my original comments made about the book and an author’s artistic licence, although I’ll concede that by this point – with a second book out, arguably founded on untruths – there is a need for some accountability, not just on the part of Frey but also his publisher, Random House, which obviously didn’t do much in the way of fact-checking before putting the book through the press. |
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