Jocelyn Parr’s celebrated novel Uncertain Weights and Measures, winner of the 2017 Quebec Writers’ Federation Concordia University First Book Prize and shortlisted for the 2017 Governor General's Award for Fiction and the 2018 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, has earned another astonishing accolade with its making the longlist for the 2019 International Dublin Literary Award! 

We tracked down Jocelyn at Dawson College and begged her to stop marking history papers for a few moments to allow us this exclusive interview:

Jocelyn Parr’s celebrated novel, Uncertain Weights and Measures, has received yet another award nomination: the International Dublin Literary Award.

Today, Rakuten Kobo Inc. announced the shortlist for the fourth annual Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, which honours the best new books by debut Canadian authors in three categories: Non-Fiction, Literary Fiction, and Genre Fiction (Mystery this year). Shortlisted in the Literary Fiction category is Jocelyn Parr’s Uncertain Weights and Measures and shortlisted in the Literary Fiction Category is Lauren McKeon's F-Bomb: Dispatches from the War on Feminism, both published by Goose Lane Editions.

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.