Kathleen Winter among finalists for 2017 Quebec Writers' Federation literary awards
The Quebec Writers' Federation has announced the finalists for their 2017 QWF Literary Awards. The prizes honour English-language writers from Quebec in six categories, with cash prizes of $2,000 each.
Award-winning author Kathleen Winter has made the shortlist for the QWF's Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for fiction for her novel Lost in September, which is also nominated for the 2017 Governor General's Literary Award for fiction.
Fellow Governor General's Literary Award for fiction finalist Uncertain Weights and Measures by Jocelyn Parr is nominated for the Concordia University First Book Prize.
Joining Winter on the Hugh MacLennan Prize shortlist are two-time Scotiabank Giller Prize shortlisted author (and 2018 CBC Short Story Prize judge) Heather O'Neill for The Lonely Hearts Hotel and Cora Siré for Behold Things Beautiful.
This year's gala ceremony will include the announcement of the the winner of the 3Macs carte blanche Prize (awarded once a year in recognition of an outstanding submission by a Quebec writer, artist, or translator) and the 2018 CBC/QWF writer-in-residence.
The event will also unveil the winner of the inaugural $1,000 QWF Literary Prize for Young Writers, awarded to a young Quebec writer between 16 and 24 years old for a work of any genre published in English in a literary publication.
Check out the complete list of finalists of each category below. The winners will be announced at an awards gala on Nov. 21, 2017.
Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for fiction:
- The Lonely Hearts Hotel by Heather O'Neill
- Behold Things Beautiful by Cora Siré
- Lost in September by Kathleen Winter
Concordia University First Book Prize:
- Arabic for Beginners by Ariela Freedman
- Uncertain Weights and Measures by Jocelyn Parr
- The Golem of Hampstead and Other Stories by J. Jacob Potashnik
A.M. Klein Prize for poetry:
- Feel Happier in 9 Seconds by Linda Besner
- The Panic Room by Rebecca Păpucaru
- Rag Cosmology by Erin Robinsong
Mavis Gallant Prize for nonfiction:
- Tax, Order, and Good Government by E. A. Heaman
- The Commander by Laila Parsons
- Standing in the Field by Sandra Perron
QWF Prize for children's and young adult literature:
- Chico by Kate Lavut
- Subject to Change by Karen Nesbitt
- Lightning Lou by Lori Weber
Cole Fondation Prize for translation — French to English:
- Rooms by Louise Dupré, translated by Karen Isabel Ocaña
- Sun of a Distant Land by David Bouchet, translated by Claire Holden Rothman
- A Tea in the Tundra/Nipishapui Nete Mushua by Joséphine Bacon, translated by Donald Winkler
- The Pauper's Freedom: Crime and Poverty in Nineteenth-Century Quebec by Jean-Marie Fecteau, translated by Peter Feldstein