Hooked by Carolyn Smart / Other People’s Lives by Chris Hutchinson / The Last House by Michael Kenyon are all longlisted in the poetry category of the ReLit Awards.

Barry Dempster’s book with Pedlar Press Ivan’s Birches is also on this list.

here’s the full article – http://therelitawards.blogspot.com/

WRITERS’ ALLIANCE ANNOUNCES SHORTLIST FOR THE 2009 HERITAGE AND HISTORY BOOK AWARD

(March 9, 2010 – St. John’s, NL) The Writers’ Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador presents the Heritage and History Book Award for a work of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, or children’s/young adult literature that exemplifies excellence in the interpretation of the history and heritage of Newfoundland and Labrador. The award is sponsored by the Historic Sites Association as a way to demonstrate appreciation for those writers whose exploration of their culture and heritage has shaped their writing.

The 2009 Heritage and History Book Award shortlist, listed alphabetically by author:
·   Ray Guy for Ray Guy: The Smallwood Years (Boulder, 2008)
·   Randall Maggs for Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems (Brick, 2008)
·   George A. Rose for Cod: The Ecological History of the North Atlantic Fisheries (Breakwater, 2007)
·   Agnes Walsh for Going Around with Bachelors (Brick, 2007)

The winner of the 2009 Heritage and History Book Award will be announced during the Historic Sites Association’s Water Street Book Club, to be held on Thursday, April 1, beginning at 7 p.m. at the gallery space of the Heritage Shop (309 Water Street).

A recipient of the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour and a National Newspaper Award, Ray Guy has been an insightful commentator and journalist for over 40 years. Starting as a newspaper reporter in the early 1960s, Guy has built a wide audience for his brand of fearless journalism and satire. He is also a well known broadcaster; for many years he was a commentator on CBC’s Here and Now. Ray is also a writer of fiction and, among his most notable achievements, he wrote for the highly acclaimed Up At Ours television series.

Randall Maggs is the artistic director of Newfoundland’s March Hare festival of music and literature, and teaches literature at Sir Wilfred Grenfell College in Corner Brook. He is the author of Timely Departures and co-editor of two anthologies pairing Newfoundland and Canadian poems with those of Ireland: However Blow the Winds and The Echoing Years. His book of poems Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems won the 2009 E.J. Pratt Poetry Award, the 2008 Winterset Award and was just named the winner of the 3rd Kobzar Literary Award.

George A. Rose is one of Canada’s best known and most respected fisheries scientists. He is widely considered to be the authority on the Newfoundland and Labrador cod fishery. He holds degrees in Fisheries and Wildlife Management from the University of Guelph, in biology from Laurentian University, and holds a doctorate in biology from McGill University. His main career interests have been in the fisheries of the North Atlantic and in world-wide conservation, particularly in Africa, on which he has published over 100 peer reviewed publications. He lives on Three Island Pond in Paradise, Newfoundland.

Agnes Walsh is an actor, playwright, storyteller, and poet. She has won several awards for her poetry, which has appeared in various literary magazines, and has read widely in North America and Europe. Her work has been translated into French, Portuguese, and Icelandic. Going Around with Bachelors is her second collection of poetry, preceded by In the Old Country of my Heart. In 2006, she was named the inaugural Poet Laureate of St. John’s, a position she held for three years.

The Heritage and History Book Award was first presented in 2004 and is awarded annually. The winner receives a $250 cash prize. The shortlist is selected from among those books submitted to The Newfoundland and Labrador Book Awards.

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Media contact:
Théa Morash, Executive Director
Writers’ Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador
102-155 Water Street
St. John’s, NL
Tel: 709-739-5215   Toll free: 1-866-739-5215
E-mail: wanl@nf.aibn.com

Established in 1987 to contribute to a supportive environment for writing in the province, the Writers’ Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador offers workshops, programs, and information to both professional and aspiring writers. http://wanl.ca/

CBC radio Corner Brook interviews Randall Maggs, the recipient of the $25,000 Kobzar Literary Award for 2010, for his acclaimed hockey saga Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems.  March 8, 2010

For the full podcast, see

http://castroller.com/podcasts/TheWestCoast/1507452-March%208/10Randall%20Maggs/Literary%20Award

CBC radio Gander interviews Randall Maggs – Leigh Anne Power is the host of the Central Morning Show – Randall’s interview is at the end of this 25 minute podcast – March 9, 2010

http://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/pastpodcasts.html?23#ref23

CBC radio Corner Brook interviews Randall Maggs, the recipient of the $25,000 Kobzar Literary Award for 2010, for his acclaimed hockey saga Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems.

For the full podcast, see http://castroller.com/podcasts/TheWestCoast/1507452-March%208/10Randall%20Maggs/Literary%20Award

CBC radio Corner Brook interviews Randall Maggs, the recipient of the $25,000 Kobzar Literary Award for 2010, for his acclaimed hockey saga Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems.

For the full podcast, see

http://castroller.com/podcasts/TheWestCoast/1507452-March%208/10Randall%20Maggs/Literary%20Award

Congratulations to Diana Fitzgerald Bryden, whose first novel No Place Strange has been been nominated for the first novel award for Canadian writers.  [Diana’s second poetry collection Clinic Day was published by Brick Books in 2004.]

No Place Strange by Diana Fitzgerald Bryden, about a romance between a Jewish girl and a Lebanese boy that is complicated by the turmoil in Beirut in the 1970s.

The $7,500 First Novel Award is administered by Amazon.ca with Quill and Quire.

The other five finalists:

Come, Thou Tortoise by Jessica Grant, about a woman who flies home to St. John’s N.L., when her father is injured, and stumbles across some dark secrets in her family’s past.

Goya’s Dog by Damian Tarnopolsky, about a British artist who thinks he’ll find his fortune in Second World War-era Toronto.

Diary of Interrupted Days by Dragan Todorovic, about a man returning to his native Belgrade.

Daniel O’Thunder by Ian Weir of B.C., about a prize-fighting evangelist in 1850s London.

The Golden Mean by Annabel Lyon, about Aristotle teaching the young Alexander the Great.

Judges include Joseph Boyden, author of Through Black Spruce, Priscila Uppal, a Toronto-based poet and novelist, and Hal Wake, the artistic director of the Vancouver International Writers Festival.

The winner will be announced in April. Previous winners include Michael Ondaatje, Nino Ricci, Anne Michaels and Joseph Boyden.

The University of Victoria, on behalf of The Malahat Review, is pleased to announce the winner of this year’s P. K. Page Founders’ Award for Poetry: Eve Joseph of Saanich, British Columbia, for her poem, “White Camellias,” which appeared in the Fall 2009 issue (168) of The Malahat Review. Eve Joseph’s award-winning poem was chosen by Barry Dempster.

The P. K. Page Founders’ Award for Poetry recognizes the excellence of The Malahat Review’s contributors by awarding a prize of $1000 to the author of the best poem or sequence of poems to have appeared in the magazine’s quarterly issues during the previous calendar year. The winner, to be chosen by an outside judge who is recognized for his or her accomplishment as a poet, is announced just prior to the publication of The Malahat Review’s Spring issue.

Of Eve Joseph’s poem, Dempster says, “Eve Joseph’s ‘White Camellias’ goes way beyond its hook of directly addressing the poems she doesn’t write. The poem in front of us breaks the silences with a wide-ranging imagination and an awareness that telling the truth is the first step in being heard. There’s a lovely lyric sweep to the poem, containing both tenderness and vigour. I was haunted by the gentling towards innerness and by the way the poem slowly opens up to the world at large. ‘White Camellias’ is a geography of the moment before the moment passes. The reader hears these lost poems as a kind of mutual discovery, poet and reader truly sharing the same page.”

Eve Joseph was born in 1953 and grew up in North Vancouver. Her first book of poetry The Startled Heart was published by Oolichan Press in 2004 and nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Award. Her second book will be released with Brick in the spring of 2010.

Barry Dempster is the author of fifteen books. He has been nominated for the Governor General’s Award twice and has won the Canadian Authors’ Association Chalmers Award for Poetry for his 2005 collection, The Burning Alphabet. In 2009, he published two new books of poetry: Love Outlandish and Ivan’s Birches. A new collection, Blue Wherever, will be published by Signature Editions this spring.

The P. K. Page Founders’ Award for Poetry honours the celebrated Victoria poet’s contribution to Canadian letters. It is made possible by a financial donation to The Malahat Review by P. K. Page in recognition of her long association with the magazine and as a gesture of her deep appreciation of her peers in the local and national literary communities.

P. K. Page (1916-2010) was born in England and came to Canada in 1919. Educated in England, Calgary, and Winnipeg, she studied art in Brazil and New York. She first came to the attention of the readers of Canadian poetry in the 1940s through her association with and regular appearances in Preview, a Montreal-based literary magazine key to the establishment of modernism in Canada. Her first important publication, Unit of Five, an anthology published by Ryerson in 1944, was followed by an impressive series of books of poetry, fiction, and memoir that display a characteristic love of ideas and a distinctive use of language that have won her admirers around the world. Her contribution was recognized early, when The Metal and the Flower (McClelland and Stewart) won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry for 1954. Her recent books of poetry include Hologram (1994), The Hidden Room: Collected Poems (1998), Hand Luggage (2006), The Filled Pen: Selected Non-fiction of P. K. Page (2006), and Up on the Roof (short fiction, 2007). Under the name P. K. Irwin, her paintings and drawings have been exhibited widely and are held in public and private collections across Canada.

TORONTO, March 5 /CNW/ – Renowned Canadian author Randall Maggs has been named the recipient of the $25,000 Kobzar Literary Award for his acclaimed hockey saga Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems (Brick Books, 2008).

Randall Maggs, a poet, editor, artistic director of Newfoundland’s March Hare Festival and a professor of literature at Memorial University, accepted the Kobzar prize on March 4 at a gala ceremony attended by over 270 guests at the Palais Royale ballroom in Toronto.

Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems recounts the personal and public life of Terry Sawchuk, premier goalie in the era of the original-six NHL. Like many other goalies, Sawchuk was “a guy from a different planet,” but he was uniquely different from other goalies. Maggs probes Sawchuk’s Winnipeg upbringing in a household of Ukrainian immigrant parents, and his dark and unpredictable character, continually at odds with his highly public athletic life. Although Maggs’ poems focus on Sawchuk and his complex personality, they also convey the physical and psychological hazards faced by professional goaltenders of the age. Illustrated by photographs, the text presents many voices, including Sawchuk’s, in a work that guides readers through the triumphs and failures of a tumultuous twenty-year NHL career.

Other finalists for the 2010 Kobzar Literary Award included Elizabeth Bachinsky of Vancouver, BC for God of Missed Connections; Paul Laverdure of Sudbury, ON for Redemption and Ritual: The Eastern Rite Redemptorists of North America, 1906-2006, and Murray Andrew Pura of Pincher Creek, AB for Zo.

The four-member jury for the 2010 Kobzar Literary Award included Canadian authors Sandra Birdsell, Janice Kulyk Keefer, Kerri Sakamoto and Richard Scrimger.

The biennial Kobzar Literary Award is sponsored by the Shevchenko Foundation. It recognizes outstanding contributions to Canadian literary arts through an author’s presentation of a Ukrainian Canadian theme with literary merit. Janice Kulyk Keefer, author of The Ladies’ Lending Library (HarperCollins, 2007) was the recipient of the 2008 Kobzar Literary Award.

For further information: Dr. Christine Turkewych, Program Director, Kobzar Literary Award and Program, Telephone: (416) 243-0122, E-mail: christine@shevchenkofoundation.com, www.kobzarliteraryaward.com

TORONTO, March 5 /CNW/ – Renowned Canadian author Randall Maggs has been named the recipient of the $25,000 Kobzar Literary Award for his acclaimed hockey saga Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems (Brick Books, 2008).

Randall Maggs, a poet, editor, artistic director of Newfoundland’s March Hare Festival and a professor of literature at Memorial University, accepted the Kobzar prize on March 4 at a gala ceremony attended by over 270 guests at the Palais Royale ballroom in Toronto.

Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems recounts the personal and public life of Terry Sawchuk, premier goalie in the era of the original-six NHL. Like many other goalies, Sawchuk was “a guy from a different planet,” but he was uniquely different from other goalies. Maggs probes Sawchuk’s Winnipeg upbringing in a household of Ukrainian immigrant parents, and his dark and unpredictable character, continually at odds with his highly public athletic life. Although Maggs’ poems focus on Sawchuk and his complex personality, they also convey the physical and psychological hazards faced by professional goaltenders of the age. Illustrated by photographs, the text presents many voices, including Sawchuk’s, in a work that guides readers through the triumphs and failures of a tumultuous twenty-year NHL career.

Other finalists for the 2010 Kobzar Literary Award included Elizabeth Bachinsky of Vancouver, BC for God of Missed Connections; Paul Laverdure of Sudbury, ON for Redemption and Ritual: The Eastern Rite Redemptorists of North America, 1906-2006, and Murray Andrew Pura of Pincher Creek, AB for Zo.

The four-member jury for the 2010 Kobzar Literary Award included Canadian authors Sandra Birdsell, Janice Kulyk Keefer, Kerri Sakamoto and Richard Scrimger.

The biennial Kobzar Literary Award is sponsored by the Shevchenko Foundation. It recognizes outstanding contributions to Canadian literary arts through an author’s presentation of a Ukrainian Canadian theme with literary merit. Janice Kulyk Keefer, author of The Ladies’ Lending Library (HarperCollins, 2007) was the recipient of the 2008 Kobzar Literary Award.

For further information: Dr. Christine Turkewych, Program Director, Kobzar Literary Award and Program, Telephone: (416) 243-0122, E-mail: christine@shevchenkofoundation.com, www.kobzarliteraryaward.com

Randall Maggs was awarded the 3rd Kobzar Literary Award for his book Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems in a gala ceremony at the Palais Royale Ballroom in Toronto on Thursday, March 4. 

The Kobzar Literary Award is a biennial $25,000 award recognizing outstanding contributions to Canadian literary arts through presentation of a Ukrainian Canadian theme with literary merit. 

Other shortlisted titles were  God of Missed Connections by Elizabeth Bachinsky (Nightwood Edition); Redemption and Ritual: The Eastern-Rite Redemptorists of North America, 1906-2006 (Redeemer’s Voice Press); and Zo by Murray Andrew Pura (Windhover Marsh)

Adjudicators:  Sandra Birdsell, Janice Kulyk Keefer, Kerri Sakamoto, Richard Scrimger

Thank you to the Shevchenko Foundation for this wonderful prize and for their hospitality.

Presented biennially, the prize is shared, with $20,000 given to the writer who best presents a Ukrainian Canadian theme with literary merit through fiction, non-fiction, playwriting, poetry, screenplay, or young people’s literature, and $5,000 to the publisher for promotion of the winning work.  Annually, the Kobzar Literary Award Program offers writers’ workshops across Canada featuring the Award winner and established Canadian writers.