Posts

CHEMICAL VALLEY a finalist for the Atlantic Book Awards!

/in /by

Chemical Valley coverChemical Valley by David Huebert (October 19, 2021), has been named a finalist for both the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award and the Alistair MacLeod Prize for Short Fiction, presented by the Atlantic Book Awards! The shortlist was announced on April 22, 2022 at the Frye Festival. The Thomas Raddall Award is one of Canada’s largest literary awards and comes with a $30,000 prize and the Alistair MacLeod Prize comes with a $1,000 prize.

Winners will be announced at the Atlantic Book Awards Gala on Thursday, June 9, 2022 at Paul O’Regan Hall in Halifax Central Library.

You can see the full list of finalists here.

Get your copy of Chemical Valley here!

ABOUT CHEMICAL VALLEY

A Siskiyou Prize Semi-Finalist • A Miramichi Reader Best Fiction Title of 2021

Out there by the dock the ocean and the air are just layers of shadow and darkness. But the creature’s flesh hums through the dark—a seep of violet in the weeping night.

From refinery operators to long term care nurses, dishwashers to preppers to hockey enforcers, Chemical Valley’s compassionate and carefully wrought stories cultivate rich emotional worlds in and through the dankness of our bio-chemical animacy. Full-hearted, laced throughout with bruised optimism and sincere appreciation of the profound beauty of our wilted, wheezing world, Chemical Valley doesn’t shy away from urgent modern questions—the distribution of toxicity, environmental racism, the place of technoculture in this ecological spasm—but grounds these anxieties in the vivid and often humorous intricacies of its characters’ lives. Swamp-wrought and heartfelt, these stories run wild with vital energy, tilt and teeter into crazed and delirious loves.

ABOUT DAVID HUEBERT

David Huebert – cr. Nicola Davison

David Huebert’s writing has won the CBC Short Story Prize, The Walrus Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the 2020 Journey Prize. David’s fiction debut, Peninsula Sinking, won a Dartmouth Book Award, was shortlisted for the Alistair MacLeod Short Fiction Prize, and was runner-up for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award. David’s work has been published in magazines such as The Walrus, Maisonneuve, enRoute, and Canadian Notes & Queries, and anthologized in Best Canadian Stories and The Journey Prize Stories. David teaches literature and creative writing at The University of New Brunswick.

A GHOST IN THE THROAT a finalist for the NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS

/in /by

Biblioasis Title A Ghost in the Throat named a finalist by the National Book Critics Circle

WINDSOR, Ont.— On the evening of Thursday, January 20th, the National Book Critics Circle announced the finalists for the 2021 publishing year. Among them is A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa.

“We’re so very happy to receive this news, and thrilled for Doireann and hope that this will help to bring even more readers to her exceptional A Ghost in the Throat,” says Dan Wells, owner and publisher of Biblioasis. “We want to thank the NBCC jury, and offer congratulations to all of the other nominees, their publishers and editors.”

A Ghost in the Throat has received wide acclaim since its publication; winner of the 2020 Nonfiction Book of the Year from the An Post Irish Book Awards, winner of the 2020 Foyles Nonfiction Book of the Year, winner of the James Tait Black Biography Prize, shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, shortlisted for the 2021 Rathbones Folio Prize, longlisted for the 2021 Gordon Burn Prize, a Guardian Best Book of 2020, a 2021 Indie Next Pick, a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2021, a Book Riot Best Book of 2021, a New York Times Notable Book of 2021, a Kirkus Best Nonfiction Book of 2021, an NPR Best Book of 2021, a Chicago Public Library Best Book of 2021, a Globe and Mail Book of the Year, a Winnipeg Free Press Top Read of 2021, an Entropy Magazine Best of the Year, a LitHub Best Book of the Year, and a New York Times Critics’ Top Book of 2021.

Doireann Ní Ghríofa is also the author of six critically acclaimed books of poetry, each a deepening exploration of birth, death, desire, and domesticity. Awards for her writing include a Lannan Literary Fellowship (USA), the Ostana Prize (Italy), a Seamus Heaney Fellowship (Queen’s University), and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, among others. This is her first work of prose.

Biblioasis is a literary press based in Windsor, Ontario. Since 2004 we have published the best in contemporary fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and literature in translation. For more information please visit our website, biblioasis.com

The National Book Critics Circle Awards, founded in 1974 at the Algonquin Hotel and considered among the most prestigious in American letters, are the sole prizes bestowed by a jury of working critics and book review editors. The awards will be presented on March 17, 2022, in a virtual ceremony that will be free and open to the public.

For more information, please contact:

Erika Sanborn
Marketing & Publicity, Biblioasis
esanborn@biblioasis.com
519-915-3930

MUSIC, LATE AND SOON a finalist for THE MAVIS GALLANT PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION

/in /by

coverWe’re thrilled to share that on Friday, October 15, Music, Late and Soon (August 24, 2021) by Robyn Sarah was announced as a finalist for the Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-fiction, presented by the Quebec Writers’ Foundation! The winner will be announced during a live-streamed gala event hosted by Giller prize-winning author Sean Michaels on November 24 at 7PM.

Since 1988, the QWF Literary Awards have celebrated the best books and plays published or performed by English-language writers and translators in Quebec, as well as those translating English works from Quebec into French. Each award comes with a purse of $3,000.

The other finalists for the Mavis Gallant Prize include: Tanya Bellehumeur-Allatt’s Peacekeeper’s Daughter: A Middle-East Memoir (Thistledown Press), Karen Messing’s Bent Out of Shape (Between the Lines), André Picard’s Neglected No More: The Urgent Need to Improve the Lives of Canada’s Elders in the Wake of a Pandemic (Random House Canada), and Samir Shaheen-Hussain’s Fighting for a Hand to Hold: Confronting Medical Colonialism Against Indigenous Children in Canada (McGill-Queen’s University Press).

The winner will be announced during a live-streamed gala event hosted by Giller prize-winning author Sean Michaels on November 24 at 7PM.

 

ABOUT MUSIC, LATE AND SOON

A poet rediscovers the artistic passion of her youth—and pays tribute to the teacher she thought she’d lost.

After thirty-five years as an “on-again, off-again, uncoached closet pianist,” poet and writer Robyn Sarah picked up the phone one day and called her old piano teacher, whom she had last seen in her early twenties. Music, Late and Soon is the story of her return to studying piano with the mentor of her youth. In tandem, she reflects on a previously unexamined musical past: a decade spent at Quebec’s Conservatoire de Musique, studying clarinet—ostensibly headed for a career as an orchestral musician, but already a writer at heart. A meditation on creative process in both music and literary art, this two-tiered musical autobiography interweaves past and present as it tracks the author’s long-ago defection from a musical career path and her late re-embrace of serious practice. At its core is a portrait of an extraordinary piano teacher and of a relationship remembered and renewed.

ABOUT ROBYN SARAH

Robyn Sarah is the author of eleven collections of poems, two collections of short stories, and a book of essays on poetry. Her tenth poetry collection, My Shoes Are Killing Me, won the Governor General’s Award for poetry in 2015.  In 2017 Biblioasis published a forty-year retrospective, Wherever We Mean to Be: Selected Poems, 1975-2015. Sarah’s writing has appeared widely in Canada, the United States, and the U.K.  Her poems have been anthologized in Best Canadian Poetry, 15 Canadian Poets x 2 and x 3, The Bedford Anthology of Literature, and The Norton Anthology of Poetry, and a dozen of them were broadcast by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac. From 2011 until 2020 she served as poetry editor for Cormorant Books. She has lived for most of her life in Montréal.

 

Get your copy of Music, Late and Soon here!