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Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction
Rawi Hage, Cockroach (House of Anansi Press)
ISBN: 9780887842092
One of the most highly anticipated novels of the year, Cockroach is as urgent, unsettling, and brilliant as Rawi Hage's bestselling and critically acclaimed first book, De Niro's Game. The novel takes place during one month of a bitterly cold winter in Montreal's restless immigrant community, where a self-described "thief" has just tried but failed to commit suicide by hanging himself from a tree in a local park. Rescued against his will, the narrator is obliged to attend sessions with a well-intentioned but naïve therapist. This sets the story in motion, leading us back to the narrator's violent childhood in a war-torn country, forward into his current life in the smoky émigré cafés where everyone has a tale, and out into the frozen night-time streets of Montreal, where the thief survives on the edge, imagining himself to be a cockroach invading the lives of the privileged, but willfully blind, citizens who surround him.
Like De Niro's Game, Cockroach combines an uncompromising vision of humanity with razor-sharp portraits of society's outsiders, and a startling, poetic sensibility with bracing jolts of dark humour.
About the Author
Rawi Hage was born in Beirut, Lebanon, and lived through nine years of the Lebanese civil war. He immigrated to Canada in 1992.
He is a writer, a visual artist, and a curator. His writings have appeared in Fuse Magazine, Mizna, Jouvert, The Toronto Review, Montreal Serai, and Al-Jadid. His visual works have been shown in galleries and museums around the world including the Canadian Museum of Civilization and the Musée de la civilisation de Québec.
Rawi's debut novel, De Niro's Game (2006), was a finalist for numerous prestigious national and international awards, and rights to the book have been sold around the world.
Rawi Hage resides in Montreal.
Quill & Quire
“Hage’s largest debt is naturally to Kafka, but in grating these influences onto a Montreal immigrant’s story, he has managed to recontextualize and transcend them. . . . a potent, honest dissection of material that is too often ignored by Canadian writers.”
CBC.ca, Kevin Chong
"Hage's look at the underbelly of organized religion and immigrant life in Canada is unflinching and grim; what's even more remarkable is that he has transformed that material into a page-turner. Cockroach's finely wrought scenes build in tension toward a conclusion that's fitting and yet unpredictable. . . . Readers are bound to be seduced."
Winnipeg Free Press
"COCKROACH reveals Hage to be no mere fluke, but a fearless talent with his best years ahead."
Ottawa Citizen
"Hage has done it again. He has produced an amazingly original and brilliant novel that shows he is no one-hit wonder, but a major force in Canadian literature."
Globe and Mail
"The things that make Rawi Hage a major literary talent - and COCKROACH as essential reading as its predecessor [DE NIRO'S GAME] - include freshness, gut-wrenching lyricism, boldness, emotional restraint, intellectual depth, historical sense, political subversiveness and uncompromising compassion."
Vancouver Sun
"[Hage is] an immensely talented writer [who presents a] fascinating portrait of a complex character who is not sure he's human."
Edmonton Journal
" . . . a tour de force novel of fearsome wit, skilled prose, and impressive imagination . . . . A beautiful, compelling, original work, one of the finest novels this year."
London Free Times
“COCKROACH echoes Hage’s trademark concern for life’s losers, for the dispossessed, the troubled and the despairing. . . .In a novel laced with dark humour and scorn for the complacency toward suffering in contemporary society, Hage dissects the immigrant experience with incisiveness and a good degree of aplomb.”
Now Magazine
"Hage is definitely the real deal . . . [Cockroach is] powerful, poetic . . . a near-thriller; you won’t be able to put it down. . . . The prose is tight, the haunting imagery beautiful and unsettling, and the setting vividly evoked."
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Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-Fiction
Taras Grescoe, Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood (HarperCollins Canada)-
ISBN- 1596912251 / 1-59691-225-1
Taras Grescoe has gone fishing in the world's oceans and rivers, and he's caught a big one - several of them in fact. In his epicurean and ethically driven quest for the perfect seafood dish, Grescoe nets some shocking discoveries about the fish we eat, where they come from and the often slimy inner workings of the multi-billion dollar industry that depends on them.
Bottomfeeder is designed, menu-style, as an account of Grescoe's globe-trotting, seafood-eating journey. He takes us from the familiar - a deep-fried visit to a Red Lobster franchise in North Carolina, where he chows down on popcorn-battered shrimp laced with chemicals, imported as local Gulf shrimp trawlers sat idle - to the foreign, such as a stay in Kochi, India, where Grescoe discovers how the curry-simmered fish and prawns he is enjoying have actually contributed to unprecedented ecological and social devastation, including playing a role in the 2005 tsunami disaster. Along the way, in a fork-to-fishing-line discourse, he tours the world's largest fish market with a marine biologist, takes celebrity chefs to task for putting threatened species on the menu and partakes in a few once-in-a-lifetime meals guaranteed to shock - and even kill - the palate. Much more than a screed against an often slippery fishing industry, however, Bottomfeeder is a food lover's highly entertaining and provocative delight, written by an intrepid adventurer who loves to dish on what's delicious, exciting and ethically digestible.
About the Author
Taras Grescoe is the author of the national bestseller The Devil's Picnic; The End of Elsewhere, a book about the horrors of travelling; and SacrÉ Blues, winner of the Edna Staebler Award, the Quebec Writers' Federation Book Award and the Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-Fiction. He is a Montreal-based journalist whose work appears in such publications as The New York Times and National Geographic.
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A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry
Peter Richardson, Sympathy for the Couriers (Véhicule Press)-
ISBN: 1550652346 / 1-55065-234-6)
Sympathy for the Couriers is a collection of messages from the border region of our livesthat vast allegorized territory of cheap self-deceptions and illusions. By turns comical and grim, these new poems feature Peter Richardson at his most ventriloquistic. The couriers in question are the banged-up, long-suffering, Dantesque voices who, speaking through the poet, deliver their news: heartfelt, often heartbreaking admissions that, nonetheless, are always buoyant with aphoristic brio and panache. But the most important messenger here is Richardson himself, who having establishing a reputation as one Canadas best poets, has given us his most challenging book.
About the Author
Peter Richardson's poems have appeared in many Canadian and American publications. His first book, A Tinkers' Picnic (Signal Editions/Véhicule), was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award in 1999. For over twenty-four years Peter Richardson has been employed as an airport ramp worker, first at Mirabel, and then Dorval. He lives in Montreal.
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McAuslan First Book Prize
Adam Gollner, The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce and Obsession (Doubleday Canada)
(ISBN: 9780743296946)
Journalist Gollner's debut is a rollicking account of the world of fruit and fruit fanatics. He's traveled to many countries in search of exotic fruits, and he describes in sensuous detail some of the hundreds of varieties he's sampled, among them peanut butter fruit, blackberry-jam fruit and coco-de-mer—a suggestively shaped coconut known as the lady fruit that grows only in the Seychelles. Equally intriguing are some of the characters he has encountered—a botanist in Borneo who spends his life studying malodorous durians; fruitarians who believe that a fruit diet promotes transcendental experiences; fruitleggers who bypass import laws; and fruit inventors such as the fabricator of the Grapple—which looks like an apple and tastes like a grape. The FDA and the often dubious activities of the international fruit trade, multinational corporations like Chiquita, come in for scrutiny, as does New York City's largest wholesale produce market, in a chapter with more information than one may want on biochemical growth inhibitors, hormone-based retardants, dyes, waxes and corrupt USDA inspectors. Gollner's passion for fruit is infectious, and his fascinating book is a testament to the fact that there is much more to the world of fruit than the bland varieties on our supermarket shelves. (May)
Review
"A rollicking account of the world of fruit and fruit fanatics. [Gollner's] traveled to many countries in search of exotic fruits, and he describes in sensuous detail some of the hundreds of varieties he's sampled, among them the peanut butter fruit, blackberry-jam fruit and coco-de-mer…. Gollner's passion for fruit is infectious, and his fascinating book is a testament to the fact that there is much more to the world of fruit than the bland varieties on our supermarket shelves."
—Publishers' Weekly, starred review
"An informative, enlightening account of fruits and their role in human life…[Gollner] explores a mind-boggling array of fruits — including Rudolph Hass's avocadoes, Ah Bing's cherries and the foreign-weirdo-turned-megafruit kiwi... He brings us into the worlds of growers, wholesalers, marketers, agricultural officials, smugglers and branders. 'Every time we eat a fruit, we're tasting forgotten histories,' he writes, recounting how fruits have fueled wars, inspired religious worship, led to group sex and caused sensations [such as] the outbreak of pear mania in 19th-century America."
—Kirkus
"A beautiful and evocative book...Adam Leith Gollner is a crazy good writer. I've got the fruit bug." –Feist
"Gollner possesses a talent as rare and exotic as a coconut pearl....lustrous and exhilarating. Gollner's is not the sort of talent one can develop. It is genetic, physical — an exquisite sensitivity of tongue, nose and eye." –The New York Times
"Highly entertaining." –Toronto Star
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QWF Prize for Children's & Young Adult Literature
Raquel Rivera, Orphan Ahwak (Orca Book Publishers)
ISBN: 9781551436531
'A hunter knows he is never alone.’ She had heard Father say that once.
Aneze looked into the trees. She spoke out loud to the bush. ‘There’s always you, Chickadee,’ she said to the small birds skittering above. ‘And if I stare long enough at the sky, I’ll see you, Eagle, circling with your wife. You will show me where Rabbit and Vole are hiding. And nearby in the stream, you are swimming, Jackfish. And you, Beaver, you are working on your house.’
‘You see,’ Aneze told the woods. ‘I’m not alone at all.’
Aneze, a young aboriginal girl, is left for dead after her village is ripped apart by a wife-raid; her father and brother are killed and her mother is kidnapped. Aneze is the only survivor. She renames herself Orphan Ahwak as she struggles to survive on her own, first in the forest and then in a remote world of tundra and sea-ice. She endures cold and hunger and befriends people whose customs are completely foreign to her. Through it all she remains determined to become a hunter and to find a place in an often hostile and terrifying world.
Raquel Rivera is a writer and artist who has written three children’s books. She has lived in Barcelona, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur but now makes her home in Montreal, Quebec, with her husband and two children.
Reviews
CM Magazine - September 14, 2007
"Rivera has written this story with touches of humor and tenderness..."
VOYA - December 1, 2007
"Rivera skillfully interweaves fact and imagination. This little story is a true gem…."
St. Albert Gazette - December 8, 2007
"A skilful blend of fact and fiction, Rivera fashions a mesmerizing page-turner that is filled with many touches of early aboriginal life."
Library Media Connection - March 1, 2008
"Orphan Ahwak features a female protagonist who is strong and resilient..."
KLIATT - May 1, 2008
"...charming...full of adventure and atmosphere."
Canadian Children's Book News - March 1, 2008
"The author's biggest achievements in this work are two-fold: her creation of a character who portrays the strength of the human spirit, and her ability to immerse us into a foreign world so completely that we miss it when it's gone."
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 QWF Translation Prize (French and English, with target language alternating each year)
Lori Saint-Martin and Paul Gagné, Big Bang (Les Allusifs), a translation of Neil Smith’s Bang Crunch (Knopf Canada [original English version left]
Dans ce remarquable premier recueil, des manifestations inattendues d’humour et de tendresse forment un univers fantasque. Écrites dans une prose incisive et limpide, les huit nouvelles qui le composent convient le lecteur à une exploration du besoin qu’ont les hommes et les femmes de nouer des liens, aussi ténus soient-ils, et peu importe ce qu’il en coûte. Nous faisons la connaissance d’un groupe de soutien aux personnes atteintes d’une tumeur bénigne qui croient leur humilité responsable de la maladie qui bourgeonne en eux. Il est question d’une jeune fille atteinte du syndrome de Fred Hoyle, dont l’âge se contracte et se dilate suivant les fluctuations de l’univers. Une veuve de fraîche date s’entretient avec les cendres de son mari, enchâssées dans une pierre de curling… Mettant en scène la tristesse, la foi, l’amour et le bonheur avec intelligence et une exquise subtilité, Neil Smith rend habilement compte de la condition humaine.
About the English Edition
An audacious New Face of Fiction debut: nine riveting stories that announce a major writer in the tradition of Yann Martel and Barbara Gowdy.
Unexpected humour and tenderness intertwine with loneliness and hopefulness in this remarkable book from an already acclaimed writer. In nine richly varied stories, written in intense, clear-eyed prose, the reader is led into an exploration of the human need for connection, however tenuous or absurd, and at whatever cost. The stories operate with heartbreaking precision, drawing us past the surface of characters’ lives and into the moments of decision and recognition that shape these people irrevocably.
Here are stories striking in the range of their shifting tone and the reach of their subjects. We are introduced to a support group for people who suspect their benign nature has caused benign tumours to grow inside them. The title story zeroes in on a girl with Fred Hoyle syndrome whose age expands and contracts like the universe. A recently widowed woman talks to her husband’s ashes, which are entombed in a hollowed-out curling stone. A store detective’s valiant act to save a pair of pink calfskin gloves is entwined with the unfortunate results of an unsuccessful space mission.
Rendering grief, loneliness, hope, love and happiness with exquisite subtlety and intelligence, Neil Smith proves himself an able chronicler of the human condition. Bang Crunch constitutes a significant achievement by a powerful new writer.
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Authors. Interviews. Readings. Streaming or On-demand. Watch now.
Hélène Rioux (left), Les artistes de la mémoire (XXY éditeur), a translation of Jeffrey Moore’s The Memory Artists (Penguin Canada)
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Enter Lit Award World Index! Over 100 Canadian and International Adult Book Award Details. 
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