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BALDWIN, STYRON, AND ME a finalist for the 2026 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction!

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We’re excited to share that Baldwin, Styron, and Me by Mélikah Abdelmoumen, translated by Catherine Khordoc, is one of the three finalists for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction! The finalist announcement was made this morning on Tuesday, November 18, and can be viewed here.

The other two nonfiction finalists are There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America by Brian Goldstone and Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li. Read more in the ALA’s full finalists press release here.

The two medal winners for Fiction and Nonfiction will be announced on January 27, 2026. A celebratory event will take place at the ALA Annual Conference in June 2026 in Chicago.

The Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction, established in 2012, recognize the best fiction and nonfiction books for adult readers published in the US in the previous year and serve as a guide to help adults select quality reading material. They are the first single-book awards for adult books given by the American Library Association and reflect the expert judgment and insight of library professionals who work closely with adult readers. The winning authors (one for fiction, one for nonfiction) receive a $5,000 cash award.

Grab a copy of Baldwin, Styron, and Me here!

ABOUT BALDWIN, STYRON, AND ME

Shortlisted for the 2026 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction • Finalist for the 2025 Governor General’s Literary Award in Translation • Finalist for the 2025 John Glassco Translation Prize

In 1961, James Baldwin spent several months in William Styron’s guest house. The two wrote during the day, then spent evenings confiding in each other and talking about race in America. During one of those conversations, Baldwin is said to have convinced his friend to write, in first person, the story of the 1831 slave rebellion led by Nat Turner. The Confessions of Nat Turner was published to critical acclaim, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1968, and also creating outrage in part of the African American community.

Decades later, the controversy around cultural appropriation, identity, and the rights and responsibilities of the writer still resonates. In Baldwin, Styron, and Me, Mélikah Abdelmoumen considers the writers’ surprising yet vital friendship from her standpoint as a racialized woman torn by the often unidimensional versions of her identity put forth by today’s politics and media. Considering questions of identity, race, equity, and the often contentious public debates about these topics, Abdelmoumen works to create a space where the answers are found by first learning how to listen—even in disagreement.

ABOUT MELIKAH ABDELMOUMEN

Mélikah Abdelmoumen was born in Chicoutimi in 1972. She lived in Lyon, France, from 2005 to 2017. She holds a PhD in literary studies from the Université de Montréal and has published many articles, short stories, novels, and essays, including Les désastrées (2013), Douze ans en France (2018), and Petite-Ville (2024). She worked as an editor with the Groupe Ville-Marie Littérature in Montreal until 2021. She was the editor-in-chief of Lettres québécoises, a Québec literary magazine, from 2021 to 2024. Baldwin, Styron, and Me is her tenth book (and the first to be translated).

ABOUT CATHERINE KHORDOC

Catherine Khordoc is a professor of French and Canadian Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa. She is the author of Tours et détours: Le mythe de Babel dans la littérature contemporaine (University of Ottawa Press, 2012). She also considers herself in many ways a frontier-dweller.

CROSSES IN THE SKY shortlisted for the J.W. Dafoe Book Prize!

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We’re thrilled to share that on September 25, 2025, the shortlist for the 2025 J.W. Dafoe Book Prize was announced, and included Crosses in the Sky: Jean de Brébeuf and the Destruction of Huronia by Mark Bourrie! View the full shortlist and announcement on their website here.

The winner of the J.W. Dafoe Book Prize, valued at $12,000, will be announced on October 14.

The J.W. Dafoe Prize memorializes Canadian editor John Wesley Dafoe, and is one of the richest book awards for exceptional non-fiction about Canada, Canadians, and the nation in international affairs.

A huge congratulations to Mark from all of us at Biblioasis.

Grab a copy of the book here!

ABOUT CROSSES IN THE SKY

From the bestselling author of Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre Esprit-Radisson

This is the story of the collision of two worlds. In the early 1600s, the Jesuits—the Catholic Church’s most ferocious warriors for Christ—tried to create their own nation on the Great Lakes and turn the Huron (Wendat) Confederacy into a model Jesuit state. At the centre of their campaign was missionary Jean de Brébeuf, a mystic who sought to die a martyr’s death. He lived among a proud people who valued kindness and rights for all, especially women. In the end, Huronia was destroyed. Brébeuf became a Catholic saint, and the Jesuit’s “martyrdom” became one of the founding myths of Canada.

In this first secular biography of Brébeuf, historian Mark Bourrie, bestselling author of Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson, recounts the missionary’s fascinating life and tells the tragic story of the remarkable people he lived among. Drawing on the letters and documents of the time—including Brébeuf’s accounts of his bizarre spirituality—and modern studies of the Jesuits, Bourrie shows how Huron leaders tried to navigate this new world and the people struggled to cope as their nation came apart. Riveting, clearly told, and deeply researched, Crosses in the Sky is an essential addition to—and expansion of—Canadian history.

ABOUT MARK BOURRIE

Mark Bourrie is an Ottawa-based author, lawyer, and journalist. He holds a master’s in journalism from Carleton University and a PhD in history from the University of Ottawa. In 2017, he was awarded a Juris Doctor degree and was called to the bar in 2018. He has won numerous awards for his journalism, including a National Magazine Award, and received the RBC Charles Taylor Prize in 2020 for his book Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson. His most recent books include Big Men Fear Me: The Fast Life and Quick Death of Canada’s Most Powerful Media Mogul, the national bestseller Crosses in the Sky: Jean de Brébeuf and the Destruction of Huronia, and Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre.

DREAMING HOME shortlisted for the 2024 Fred Kerner Book Award!

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We’re excited to share that Dreaming Home by Lucian Childs has been shortlisted for the Canadian Authors’ Association’s 2024 Fred Kerner Book Award! The shortlist was announced on July 21, and you can check out the full list here.

On Dreaming Home, one judge commented,

“From the opening sentence we know we’re in the hands of a master craftsman. This novel opens up through multiple, connected points of view into a landscape that’s deeply problematic: from the damaged father, through the gay son who refuses to accept the deal he’s been dealt, to the sister who propelled them into this abyss. Trauma impacts them all in unexpected and illuminating ways. Challenging and poignant, but ultimately joyful.”

Another judge praised,

“A poignant and sensitively written story of the profound repercussions of a forced outage of a young boy by his sibling and the decades-long fallout that ensues for him, his family members, and his lovers. Told from multiple perspectives, the narrative is compelling and heartbreaking, with a gentle hint of humour.”

The Fred Kerner Book Award is awarded annually to a Canadian Authors member who has the best overall book published in the previous calendar year, including fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

The winner will be announced at a virtual Fred Kerner Book Award readings event in early September, with the event date to be announced in August.

Get a copy of Dreaming Home here!

ABOUT DREAMING HOME

Shortlisted for the 2024 Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize • Shortlisted for the 2024 Fred Kerner Book Award • A Globe and Mail Best Spring Book • One of Lambda Literary Review‘s Most Anticipated LGBTQ+ Books of June 2023 • A Southern Review Book to Celebrate in June 2023 • A 49th Shelf Best Book of 2023

When a sister’s casual act of betrayal awakens their father’s demons—ones spawned by his time in Vietnamese POW camps—the effects of the ensuing violence against her brother ripple out over the course of forty years, from Lubbock, to San Francisco, to Fort Lauderdale. Swept up in this arc, the members of this family and their loved ones tell their tales. A queer coming-of-age, and coming-to-terms, and a poignant exploration of all the ways we search for home, Dreaming Home is the unforgettable story of the fragmenting of an American family.

Credit: Marc Lostracco

ABOUT LUCIAN CHILDS

Lucian Childs is a fiction writer whose debut, Dreaming Home (Biblioasis 2023), was shortlisted for the 2024 Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize in literary fiction. He was a Peter Taylor Fellow at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and a finalist for the Faulkner-Wisdom Short Story Award. He is a contributing editor of the Lambda Literary finalist, Building Fires in the Snow: a collection of Alaska LGBTQ short fiction and poetry. His stories and reviews have appeared in the journals Grain, The Puritan, Plenitude, and Prairie Fire, among others. Born and raised in Dallas, Texas, he currently resides in Toronto, Ontario.

MUSIC, LATE AND SOON shortlisted for the 2022 J.I. Segal Awards Best Quebec Book on a Jewish Theme!

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coverWe’re thrilled to share that Music, Late and Soon by Robyn Sarah (August 24, 2022) has been shortlisted for the 2022 J.I. Segal Awards Best Quebec Book on a Jewish Theme! The shortlist was announced on September 21, 2022. Check out the full list here.

“We are thrilled to be able to include five outstanding titles by well-known writers in our short-list,” said Université de Montréal Professor and Awards Committee Chair Robert Schwartzwald in response to the jury’s announcement. “With books in both English and French and from a variety of genres, there is much to celebrate as we prepare to reward the best Quebec Book on a Jewish Theme!”

For over half a century, the Jacob Isaac Segal Awards have been an important community recognition of Jewish-based literature. Since 2020, the Best Quebec Book on a Jewish Theme award also honours the contribution of Jewish culture to a richly diverse contemporary Quebec.

The 2022 J.I. Segal Award for the Best Quebec Book on a Jewish Theme is accompanied by a $5,000 cash prize. The winner will be announced on November 10th, 2022.

Grab your copy of Music, Late and Soon here!

ABOUT MUSIC, LATE AND SOON

Shortlisted for the J.I Segal Awards Best Quebec Book on a Jewish Theme • Shortlisted for the The Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-Fiction

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.

Credit: Stephen Brockwell

ABOUT ROBYN SARAH

Robyn Sarah is the author of eleven collections of poems, two collections of short stories, a book of essays on poetry, and a memoir, Music, Late and Soon. Her tenth poetry collection, My Shoes Are Killing Me, won the Governor General’s Award in 2015. In 2017 Biblioasis published a forty-year retrospective, Wherever We Mean to Be: Selected Poems, 1975-2015. Sarah’s poems have been anthologized in The Norton Anthology of Poetry and have been 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.

QUERELLE OF ROBERVAL shortlisted for the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize!

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We’re thrilled to share that Querelle of Roberval by Kevin Lambert, translated by Donald Winkler (August 2, 2022) is a finalist for the 2022 Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Prize for Fiction!

The shortlist was announced at 10AM ET on September 14, 2022. You can read the full shortlist here.

The judges’ citation states: “Kevin Lambert’s fearless novel is a profane, funny, bleak, touching, playful, and outrageous satire of sexual politics, labour, and capitalism. In ecstatic and cutting prose, it gleefully illuminates both the broad socio-political tensions of life in a Quebec company town and the intimate details of sex, lust, loneliness, and gay relationships in such a place. Like its central character, the book is brash, beautiful, quasi-mythic, and tragic. Most improbably, for all its daring and provocation, Querelle of Roberval is lyrically, even tenderly written.”

Publisher Dan Wells said this about the shortlisting: “I am so pleased for Kevin, and for Don Winkler, Querelle‘s exceptional translator, and grateful to the Writers’ Trust jury for understanding that the novel’s various discomforts, savage as some of them may be, are always perfectly aligned to the book’s spirit and purpose. This is classic tragedy with a twist, and I’m thrilled that this nomination will help us bring Kevin’s and Don’s work to a wider range of readers than might otherwise have been the case.”

Named in honour of Writers’ Trust co-founders and literary couple Margaret Atwood and Graeme Gibson, who started the organization in 1976 with the help of a few fellow writers and an aim to encourage a Canadian literary culture at home, the Atwood Gibson Prize recognizes writers of exceptional talent for the best novel or short story collection of the year.

The finalists are selected by a three-member, independent judging panel and the $60,000 winner is announced at the annual Writers’ Trust Awards. The award is generously funded by Canadian businessman and philanthropist Jim Balsillie.

Grab your copy of Querelle of Roberval here!

ABOUT QUERELLE OF ROBERVAL

Shortlisted for the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize

Homage to Jean Genet’s antihero and a brilliant reimagining of the ancient form of tragedy, Querelle of Roberval, winner of the Marquis de Sade Prize, is a wildly imaginative story of justice, passion, and murderous revenge.

Credit: Gregory Augendre-Cambron

As a millworkers’ strike in the northern lumber town of Roberval drags on, tensions start to escalate between the workers—but when a lockout renews their solidarity, they rally around the mysterious and magnetic influence of Querelle, a dashing newcomer from Montreal. Strapping and unabashed, likeable but callow, by day he walks the picket lines and at night moves like a mythic Adonis through the ranks of young men who flock to his apartment for sex. As the dispute hardens and both sides refuse to yield, sand stalls the gears of the economic machine and the tinderbox of class struggle and entitlement ignites in a firestorm of passions carnal and violent. Trenchant social drama, a tribute to Jean Genet’s antihero, and a brilliant reimagining of the ancient form of tragedy, Querelle of Roberval, winner of France’s Marquis de Sade Prize, is a wildly imaginative story of justice, passion, and murderous revenge.

ABOUT KEVIN LAMBERT

Born in 1992, Kevin Lambert grew up in Chicoutimi, Quebec. He earned a master’s degree in creative writing at the Université de Montréal. His widely acclaimed first novel, You Will Love What You Have Killed, was a finalist for Quebec’s Booksellers’ Prize. His second novel, Querelle of Roberval, won France’s Marquis de Sade Prize, and was a finalist for the prestigious Prix Médicis and the literary prize of the Paris newspaper Le Monde. In Canada, Querelle of Roberval won the Prix Ringuet of the Quebec Academy of Arts and Letters, was a finalist for the Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal and won or was a finalist for six other literary prizes. Kevin Lambert lives in Montreal.

ABOUT DONALD WINKLER

Donald Winkler is a translator of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. He is a three-time winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for French-to-English translation. He lives in Montreal.