Book Awards – LBGTQ+ books, translations and more!
It seems it is well and truly book prize season! A number of book prizes have been awarded over the past week, and there are some really interesting books in the mix. Look below for updates on the Best Translated Book Award, the Dayne Ogilvie Prize and The Indie Book Awards. As always, you can find these winners and former prize winners on the master list of book awards HERE.
Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Emerging Writers
This annual award is given to an emerging writer from the Canadian LBGTQ community. Last year’s winner, Ben Ladouceur was the author of a poetry anthology called Otter.
Winner
nîtisânak by Lindsay Nixon
“The writing of Lindsay Nixon is a triumph of decolonial and non-normative storytelling. They assert an acute refusal of the reductive expectations of tragic Indigeneity and white-centred hegemonic queerness, calling upon more rigorous, nuanced, and wholehearted aesthetics and knowledge bases. Nixon is a new, vital voice for queercore culture, ancestral and chosen family inheritances, sex and kink positivity, and Cree and prairie wisdom. Their transformative memoir, nîtisânak,uplifts non-linear narration, poetic prose, and intertextual dialogue and will surely be discussed and beloved for many, many years to come.” —2019 Dayne Ogilvie Prize jury (Amber Dawn and Kai Cheng Thom)
Finalists
Ritual Lights by Joelle Barron
“Joelle Barron understands that poetry can be a bright witness, and their debut poetry collection, Ritual Lights,asks us to look at sexual violence, health and healing, and queer love. In this current age of trauma-informed literature, Barron not only broadens the vital conversation, they remind us that challenging content can be crafted into lasting lyrical testaments. Page by page, image by image, Barron offers verse that is nimble, compassionate, and affecting.”—2019 Dayne Ogilvie Prize jury (Amber Dawn and Kai Cheng Thom)
Little Fish by Casey Plett
“Casey Plett’s work goes straight to the bone of what it means to be human in a world that is at once cruel and kind — and not always in equal measure. Her prose shimmers with sharp insight, heartbreaking humour, and above all, total mastery of the craft of writing. With consummate skill, Plett challenges us to see the lives of the trans women, sex workers, and other marginalized people she writes about with greater clarity and depth: a lasting gift that will leave its mark on Canadian and LGBTQ literature.” —2019 Dayne Ogilvie Prize jury (Amber Dawn and Kai Cheng Thom)
The Next Generation Indie Book Awards is the largest international book awards program for indie authors and independent publishers. It has numerous categories, but chooses one overall fiction and non-fiction winner every year.
Winner – Fiction
Beloved Mother by Laura Hunter
“A story of the lives of three women, tightly woven together and surviving the harsh societal environment of an Appalachian mining town in the early to mid-1900s. Two religions contrast with each other—the Cherokee spirits of the native people and the Old Testament God of the white settlers—as each woman struggles to find her place. Love and hate, marriage and adultery, childbirth and abortion, all have their parts to play. Beloved Mother accurately portrays the evilness in humanity, in which the wicked corrupt the innocent to create a vicious cycle of abuse, until one person—with a heart of understanding and forgiveness—has the courage to end it.”
Winner – Nonfiction
The Telling Image: Shapes of Changing Times by Lois Farfel Stark
How do humans make sense
of the world? In answer to this timeless question, award winning
documentary filmmaker, Lois Farfel Stark, takes the reader on a
remarkable journey from tribal ceremonies in Liberia and the pyramids in
Egypt, to the gravity-defying architecture of modern China. Drawing on
her experience as a global explorer, Stark unveils a crucial, hidden key
to understanding the universe: Shape itself.
The Telling Image
is a stunning synthesis of civilization’s changing mindsets, a
brilliantly original perspective urging you to re-envision history not
as a story of kings and wars but through the lens of shape. In this
sweeping tour through time, Stark takes us from migratory humans, who
imitated a web in round-thatched huts and stone circles, to the urban ladder of pyramids and skyscrapers, organized by hierarchy and measurements, to today’s world of interconnected networks.
Finalists – Fiction
Two Skies Before Night by Robert Gryn
Torment: A Novella by H.D. Hunter
Finalists – Nonfiction
The Stephen Decatur House: A History by James Tertius deKay, Michael Fazio, Osborne Phinizy Mackie, and Katherine Malone-France
Tales from an Uncertain World: What Other Assorted Disasters Can Teach Us About Climate Change by L.S. Gardiner
This award is an American literary award that recognizes the previous year’s best original translation into English, one book of poetry and one of fiction. The award takes into consideration not only the quality of the translation but the entire package: the work of the original writer, translator, editor, and publisher.
Winner – Fiction
Slave Old Man by Patrick Chamoiseau, translated from French and Creole by Linda Coverdale
“In turns biblical and mythical, Patrick Chamoiseau’s Slave Old Man is a powerful reckoning with the agonies of the past and their persistence into the present. It is a modern epic, a history of the Caribbean, and a tribute to Creole languages, all told through the story of one slave old man. Linda Coverdale’s translation sings as she beautifully renders language as lush and vividly alive as the wilderness the old man plunges into in his flight to freedom. It is dreamy yet methodical prose, vivid, sensual but also a touch strange, forcing you to slow down and reread. Thoughtful, considered footnotes provide added context and explanation, enriching the reader’s understanding of this powerful and subversive work of genius by a master storyteller. Slave Old Man is a thunderclap of a novel. His rich language, brilliant in Coverdale’s English, evokes the underground forces of resistance that carry the slave old man away. It’s a novel for fugitives, and for the future.”
Winner – Poetry
Of Death. Minimal Odes by Hilda Hilst, translated from Portuguese by Laura Cesarco Eglin
“The first collection of Hilda Hilst’s poetry to be appear in English, Of Death. Minimal Odes is masterfully translated by Laura Cesarco Eglin. Hilda Hilst’s odes are searing, tender blasphemies. One is drawn to Of Death in the way we’re drawn to things that might be dangerous. These are poems that lure readers well beyond their best interests, regardless of whatever scars might be sustained. In language that is twisted, animalistic, yet at times plain, Eglin reveals another layer in the work of this Brazilian great.”
