Jordan Abel, Alicia Elliott and Amanda Peters among finalists for $60K Amazon Canada First Novel Award
The prize recognizes the best Canadian debut novel of the year
Writers Jordan Abel, Alicia Elliott and Amanda Peters are among the six finalists for the 2024 Amazon Canada First Novel Award.
The $60,000 award is a collaboration between Amazon Canada and The Walrus recognizing the best debut Canadian novel of the year. The remaining finalists will each receive $6,000.
Abel is nominated for his novel Empty Spaces, a reimagining of James Fenimore Cooper's 19th-century text The Last of the Mohicans from a modern urban perspective. Abel explores what it means to be Indigenous without access to familial territory and complicates popular understandings about Indigenous storytelling.
Abel is a Nisga'a writer from British Columbia. He is also the author of the poetry collections The Place of Scraps, Un/inhabited and Injun. In 2017, he won the Griffin Poetry Prize for Injun.
Elliott is shortlisted for And Then She Fell, a horror novel which follows a young woman named Alice struggling to navigate the early days of motherhood and live up to the unrealistic expectations of those around her.
Elliott is a Mohawk writer currently based in Brantford, Ont. Her writing has been published most recently in Room, Grain and The New Quarterly. She is also the author of the nonfiction book A Mind Spread Out on the Ground, a columnist for CBC Arts and CBC Books named her a writer to watch in 2019. She was chosen by Tanya Talaga as the 2018 recipient of the RBC Taylor Emerging Writer Award.
Peters is a finalist for The Berry Pickers, which tells the story of a four-year-old girl from a Mi'kmaq family who goes missing in Maine's blueberry fields in the 1960s. Nearly 50 years later, Norma, a young girl from an affluent family is determined to find out what her parents aren't telling her. Little by little, the two families' interconnected secrets unravel.
The Berry Pickers won the 2024 Carnegie Medal for Excellence, was a finalist for the 2023 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and was named one of CBC Books' best fiction books of the year.
Amanda Peters is a writer of Mi'kmaq and settler ancestry living in Annapolis Valley, N.S. Her work has appeared in The Antigonish Review, the Alaska Quarterly Review and The Dalhousie Review. She was also the winner of the 2021 Indigenous Voices Award for Unpublished Prose and a participant in the 2021 Writers' Trust Rising Stars program.
The other shortlisted authors are Caroline Dawson for As the Andes Disappeared, Kōtuku Titihuia Nuttall for Tauhou and Janika Oza for A History of Burning.
Dawson's As the Andes Disappeared, translated by Anita Anand, is a coming of age, autobiographical story following Caroline and her family's migration from Chile to Montreal. Once arrived, she joins her parents as they clean banks at night and experiences racism at school, learns pop culture and develops a love for reading and writing in French. As time goes on, her identity becomes more and more detached from that of her parents and the novel explores how, despite this, there's still an importance to be placed on family and home.
Nuttall's Tauhou examines Indigenous families, womanhood and reimagines post-colonial histories and futures. Set on alternate versions of Vancouver Island and Aotearoa New Zealand that, in this story, are located beside each other in the ocean, each chapter contains a poem, a short story and a form of memory. Throughout the stories, the Coast Salish and Māori people work together to right wrongs, heal and confront colonialism from the beginning when the first ships arrived.
Oza's A History of Burning is an epic novel about how one act of rebellion can influence a family for generations. It's 1898 and a 13-year-old boy in India named Pirbhai needs to make money to support his family and ends up inadvertently being sent across the ocean to be a labourer for the British. He has a choice to make, and what he does will change the course of his life, and his family's fate, for years to come. The story takes readers to Uganda, India, England and Canada in the wake of Pirbhai's choice as the novel explores the impacts of colonialism, resistance, exile and the power of family.
Oza made the 2019 CBC Short Story Prize longlist for her story The Gift of Choice, which is a chapter in A History of Burning.
The jury is composed of writers Billy-Ray Belcourt, francesca ekwuyasi, Kaie Kellough and Souvankham Thammavongsa.
The winner will be announced at an in-person award ceremony in Toronto on June 6.
Last year's winner was Jasmine Sealy for The Island of Forgetting.
Other past winners include Stéphane Larue for The Dishwasher, Joy Kogawa for Obasan, Rohinton Mistry for Such a Long Journey, Anne Michaels for Fugitive Pieces and Madeleine Thien for Certainty.
