Today, the Atlantic Publishers Marketing Association announced the shortlist for the 2018 Best Atlantic Published Book Award, which recognizes excellence in Atlantic Canadian publishing. Of the five finalists, two titles published by Goose Lane Editions are being recognized for their excellence:
RBC Taylor Prize 2018 Jurors Christine Elliott, Anne Giardini, and James Polk have announced the longlist for the seventeenth awarding of Canada’s most prestigious non-fiction prize. Among the longlisted titles is award-winning journalist and bestselling author Jan Wong’s Apron Strings: Navigating Food and Family in France, Italy, and China, published by Goose Lane Editions.
Established in 1998 by the trustees of the Charles Taylor Foundation and first awarded in 2000, 2018 marks the seventeenth awarding of the RBC Taylor Prize, which commemorates Charles Taylor’s pursuit of excellence in the field of literary non-fiction. The jurors read a record breaking 153 non-fiction books submitted by 110 Canadian and international publishers. Other longlisted titles include Seven Fallen Feathers by Tanya Talaga and Life on the Ground Floor by James Maskalyk.
Jan Wong knows food is better when it’s shared, so when she set out to research home cooking in several countries known for their distinctive cuisine, she asked her 22-year-old son, Sam, to join her. A memoir about family, an exploration of the globalization of food cultures, and a meditation on the complicated relationships between mothers and sons, Apron Strings is complex, unpredictable, and unexpectedly hilarious.
Of the book, the jury wrote: “Jan Wong proves in this book that the old adage ‘you are what you eat’ needs expanding. We are what we eat, and who we make it with, and who we eat it with, and what ingredients we use, and what recipes we follow, and where in the world our table is located. In this book Jan Wong focuses her laser beam scrutiny on domestic life and comestibles in three different countries, and delivers shrewd home truths on how we sustain and nourish ourselves.”
The RBC Taylor Prize shortlist will be announced at a news conference on Wednesday, January 10, 2018, and the winner revealed at a gala luncheon on Monday, February 26, 2018.
The Quebec Writers’ Federation (QWF) Literary Awards announced the winners of their award categories at the QWF’s 19th annual gala. Taking home the Concordia University First Book Prize was Goose Lane Editions author Jocelyn Parr and her stunning debut novel, Uncertain Weights and Measures.
Uncertain Weights and Measures, first published in September 2017, takes place in the heady days of post-Revolution Russia. Montreal writer Jocelyn Parr vividly captures the atmosphere of 1920s Moscow and the frisson of real-life events while also spinning a captivating tale of a love torn apart by ideology and high-stakes politics in this deftly written novel. Giller Prize winner Sean Michaels marvelled at Parr’s characters that “seem to move under the surface of the page—breathing, changing, flawed, and resilient.”
Also shortlisted for the award were Ariela Freedman’s Arabic for Beginners and J. Jacob Potashnik’s The Golem of Hampstead and Other Stories.
As you may know, Goose Lane author Jocelyn Parr's debut novel Uncertain Weights and Measures has been recently shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award for Adult Fiction (as well as the Concordia University First Book Prize from the Quebec Writers' Federation).
Jocelyn was nice enough to find time in her busy schedule to answer a few questions for us.
1. What was the impetus behind Uncertain Weights and Measures?
A friend happened to loan me a tremendous book called Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. In it, I found a very short, very intriguing article which described the brain institute that displayed Lenin's brain in the early Stalin years. The way the institute combined science, politics and something akin to a reliquary intrigued me, so I wanted to read everything I could find about it.
It turns out, there wasn't much published about it because the history of the institute had been systematically erased once the cult of Stalin surpassed the cult of Lenin. When my sources ran dry, I started inventing.
2. Did your novel change at all once it was accepted for publication?
It changed quite a bit. My editor, Bethany Gibson, was the perfect combination of challenging and encouraging, so in part due to her, I cut one character and vastly expanded another. In total, I added about 15,000 words, or 60 pages, to the manuscript that year, but I probably added even more, given how much I cut.
3. How do you feel having your debut novel be nominated for The Governor General's Award for Adult Fiction?
It's a tremendous recognition. I feel very lucky.
4. Did you ever think such your work would achieve such an honour?
I hoped it would happen one day!
5. What has the reaction been to the nomination?
It's been a dream: my loved ones are over the moon, my students and colleagues are surprised and impressed to see me cast in the new light of "writer" as opposed to "historian," and the community more broadly has shown an excitement about the book that has been very rewarding.
6. In Canada, the big literary awards are the GG, the Giller Prize, and the Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. What do you think of the fact that, for the first time since all three awards have co-existed, not one single book appears in more than one list?
I'm really glad you asked this question. This year, publishers had to deal with different constraints on how many books they could submit to a given award, so this may explain, in part, why the lists are so different, but I think a broader explanation is that there were likely many, many excellent books vying for those coveted top spots.
What these lists tell me, and what I hope they tell readers in Canada, is that there is something beautifully arbitrary about which books make lists like these. The juries are composed of people, after all, and although they are esteemed writers themselves, I doubt they'd describe themselves as the perfect judges of all things literary. Instead, they know a good sentence when they see one, and they recognize craft, and they fall in love with characters, and they are intrigued and moved and awed in mercurial ways, just like the rest of us.
I can only imagine that the juries had long and difficult conversations as they tried to convince each other which books deserved the kind of attention that comes with such nominations. That the lists they produced are so different could be due to different books having been submitted, but I think they're also due to different readers making the selections, which is to say that had there been other juries, a whole other set of books might have been nominated. Our question, then, as readers, should be about those yet-to-be-discovered books, the ones that might have nominated had the jury (or wind, or universe) been different.
The next book I'm working on is a book that explores the relationship between my family's history and settler colonialism. For the past two hundred years, my ancestors have lived all over the so-called Commonwealth and our movements have manifested the patterns of settlers the world over. The book is a reckoning with that in light of the calls to action put forth by 2015's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It's written as a series of short interlockingpieces, some tender, some hard.
Last night, Bobbi-Jean MacKinnon and M. Travis Lane took home prizes at the New Brunswick Book Awards. MacKinnon’s national bestseller, Shadow of Doubt: The Dennis Oland Trial, won the NB Book Award for Non-Fiction. Lane’s collected long poems, The Witch of the Inner Wood, edited by Shane Neilson, won the poetry award.
Shadow of Doubt, the story of Richard Oland’s murder and Dennis Oland’s trial, was published in October 2016 and spent several weeks on the national bestseller list. The judges praised MacKinnon’s ability to take a complex story and transform it into a page-turner. Shadow of Doubt has also been shortlisted for the Arthur Ellis Award for Crime Writing.
The Witch of the Inner Wood, published to critical acclaim in September 2016, brings together the masterful long poems of M. Travis Lane. Critics have praised the “structural virtuosity of her poems” as well as her “inquisitive, musical, humane, and instantly recognizable voice.” M. Travis Lane was first published in 1973 by Fiddlehead Poetry Books, the predecessor of Goose Lane Editions. She won the Lieutenant-Governor’s Award for High Achievement in the Arts in 2016.
