The Writers' Trust Awards 2013

The nominations for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize were announced:

 Krista Bridge for The Eliot Girls 
Not yet available in the Parkland Regional Library System.




Lynn Coady for Hellgoing 
With astonishing range and depth, Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist Lynn Coady gives us eight unforgettable new stories, each one of them grabbing our attention from the first line and resonating long after the last. A young nun charged with talking an anorexic out of her religious fanaticism toys with the thin distance between practicality and blasphemy. A strange bond between a teacher and a schoolgirl takes on ever deeper, and stranger, shapes as the years progress. A bride-to-be with a penchant for nocturnal bondage can't seem to stop bashing herself up in the light of day. Equally adept at capturing the foibles and obsessions of men and of women, compassionate in her humour yet never missing an opportunity to make her characters squirm, fascinated as much by faithlessness as by faith, Lynn Coady is quite possibly the writer who best captures what it is to be human at this particular moment in our history.

Cary Fagan for A Bird’s Eye
With all the wonder of a small-scale The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay comes this moving and unforgettable novel about childhood, love, and magic. Growing up in a Jewish neighbourhood in the 1930s, young Benjamin Kleeman falls in love, first with Corrine Foster and then with magic. Hiding his new passions from his parents -- the long-suffering Bella, an Italian immigrant, and Jacob, a talented but failed inventor of elaborate mechanical devices -- Benjamin begins apprenticeships in magic and life itself, learning along the way that everything is more complicated than it seems. With wit, tenderness, humour, and, startling beauty, Cary Fagan brings a gifted young man's rise to a peculiar kind of stardom, wonderfully alive.

Colin McAdam for A Beautiful Truth
Not yet available in the Parkland Regional Library System.




Lisa Moore for Caught
"In the creation of David Slaney, Lisa Moore brings us an unforgettable character, embodying the exuberance and energy of misspent youth. Caught is a propulsive and harrowing read." - Patrick deWitt, author of The Sisters Brothers Internationally acclaimed author Lisa Moore offers us a remarkable new novel about a man who escapes from prison to embark upon one of the most ambitious pot-smuggling adventures ever attempted. Here are bravado and betrayal, bad weather and seas, love, undercover agents, the collusion of governments, unbridled ambition, innocence and the loss thereof, and many, many bales of marijuana. Here, too, is the seeming invincibility of youth and all the folly that it allows. Caught is an exuberant, relentlessly suspenseful, and utterly unique novel, and promises to be the astonishing Lisa Moore's most accomplished work to date.

The winners will be announced on November 20th. The Writers' Trust Fiction Prize website offers more information.

This is a very different list of nominees when compared to the Giller or the Man Booker lists. Check them all out and see what you think!