Sheung-King, Martha Baillie among Writers' Trust literary prize winners
More than $340,000 given out across 7 prizes, recognizing fiction, nonfiction and poetry
Authors Sheung-King and Martha Baillie were among the honourees at the 2024 Writers' Trust of Canada Awards, recognizing the country's best writers and books of the year.
Seven prizes were given out, totalling over $340,000, in recognition of the best in fiction, nonfiction and short story writing, plus mid-career and lifetime achievement awards.
The winners were announced on Tuesday at a ceremony in Toronto, hosted by playwright and actor Charlie Petch.
Sheung-King, Baillie take home top book prizes
Sheung-King's novel Batshit Seven won the $60,000 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction prize, recognizing the best novel or short story collection by a Canadian author.
In Batshit Seven, Glen "Glue" Wu has a general apathy toward his return to Hong Kong from Toronto. As a lacklustre, weed smoking, hungover ESL teacher, Glue watches passively as Hong Kong falls into conflict around him. He cares only for his sister, who is trying to marry rich, and for both an on-and-off-again relationship and the memory of a Canadian connection now lost. Government control hardens, thrusting Glue into a journey that ultimately ends in violence.
"Glue feels like there's a sense of amnesia, collective amnesia, that he feels in Hong Kong because it's so focused on finance and everyday life is very kind of corporate," said Sheung-King in an interview on The Next Chapter.
Why he longs for Canada is not only because of somebody he misses, but also back then he was more intellectually engaged.— Sheung-King
"He doesn't have access to any art scene or communities. He lives in the suburbs alone on an island in his childhood home and all of this is the doing of the larger governments that were in charge of Hong Kong."
"And Glue is aware that Hong Kong was designed to be a place like this. Why he longs for Canada is not only because of somebody he misses, but also back then he was more intellectually engaged."
The Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust jury — comprised of fiction writers Saeed Teebi, Joan Thomas and Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike — praised Sheun-King for conveying "the dilemma of the self aware citizen."
"A perfect amalgam of form and idea, Batshit Seven is poignant, darkly hilarious, and stunningly original," they wrote in a statement.
Batshit Seven is Sheung-King's second novel. His first, You Are Eating an Orange. You are Naked., was a finalist for multiple awards, including the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction and the Amazon Canada First Novel Award. It was also longlisted for Canada Reads 2021. Sheung-King splits his time between Canada and China.
"At times of global crisis and humanity diminishes, what we know how to do is return to writing for clarity, because writing is not about settling — it is built imagining for a better future. So I want to thank you to all my fellow artists and writers here who are writing — and to continue to write against state violence, to write against borders, write against war, write against genocide and to write so that we can have a better future," he said in his acceptance speech.
The four remaining Atwood Gibson Prize finalists will each receive $5,000. They are Éric Chacour for What I Know About You, translated by Pablo Strauss, Conor Kerr for Prairie Edge, Canisia Lubrin for Code Noir and Fawn Parker for Hi, It's Me.
The books are available in accessible formats through the National Network for Equitable Library Services and the Centre for Equitable Library Access.
Last year's winner was Kai Thomas for his novel In The Upper Country.
Baillie's memoir There Is No Blue won the $75,000 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Award for Nonfiction, the largest prize for nonfiction in Canada.
In There Is No Blue, the Toronto-based author writes three essays about significant losses she experienced. It's a response to the death of her mother, father and sister along with ruminations on what made them so alive.
"I wrote the book, in part, because I wanted to encourage discussion of issues around mental health, schizophrenia in particular, but many aspects of mental health," Baillie told CBC Books in an interview. "And so I am very grateful that this prize will mean that more people will be aware of the book's existence."
"I did not anticipate that I would be standing up here at the moment. My greatest desire is to hide, but in this precarious moment that we live in, I think hiding is the last thing we can allow ourselves to indulge in. So I salute all the wild attempts by writers to make sense and make meaning out of the incredible messiness of being human," said Baillie in her acceptance speech.
Baillie's novel The Incident Report was on the 2009 Giller Prize longlist and was adapted into a feature film called Darkest Miriam. Her other books include Sister Language and The Search for Heinrich Schlögel.
There Is No Blue was selected by jurors Annahid Dashtgard, Taylor Lambert and Christina Sharpe. Sharpe won last year's prize for her book Ordinary Notes.
The jury called There Is No Blue "an elegy to the beautiful fight to keep a family together and an ode to the devastating loss when things fall apart."
The four remaining finalists will each receive $5,000. They are Chase Joynt's Vantage Points, Amy Lin's Here After, Lisa Moore and Jack Whalen's Invisible Prisons and Jenny Heijun Wills' Everything and Nothing At All.
The third book prize presented at the ceremony was the Dayne Ogilvie Prize for 2SLGBTQ+ emerging writers. Anthony Oliveira, a Toronto-based author, pop culture critic, podcaster and PhD, took home $12,000 for Dayspring, a bold reimagining of biblical tales that weaves together stories of passion, grief and destruction.
Anuja Varghese won the Dayne Ogilvie Prize in 2023 for Chrysalis. Earlier this year, Varghese pledged $25,000 — $5,000 per year for the next five years — to the prize, stating she wanted to use the award to "open doors for other queer writers the way doors have been opened" for her.
"This is a moment when a curtain is descending and a chill is already starting to be felt. One of the communities that is going to be most in danger from this is the queer community. So I have a unique chance in this room to address the publishing industry. And we all need to stand up," said Oliveira in her speech.
Four authors win career awards
Métis/Dene writer, director, and producer Marie Clements won the $40,000 Matt Cohen Award, which celebrates a lifetime of distinguished work.
Clements, based in Galiano Island in B.C., has worked in theatre, film, television and radio and founded a media production company that highlights Indigenous and intercultural voices. She's known for her plays Copper Thunderbird, which was nominated for the Governor General's Literary Award in 2008, and Burning Vision, which won a Canada Japan Literary Award. Clements's documentaries include Lay Down Your Heart and The Road Forward, which was nominated for the 2018 Writers Guild of Canada's Documentary Screenwriting Award. Her feature drama Red Snow won multiple awards at Canadian film festivals and her feature film and episodic drama Bones of Crows is available on CBC Gem.
"It feels like I've been writing all of my life, but I think that's untruthful. Before I wrote, I read — and those writers allowed me to recognize myself and my world," said Clements in her speech. "I looked for them. I sought them out as if my life depended on it. And when I found them, I recognize myself in them. And this gave me hope."
Madeleine Thien took home the $25,000 Writers' Trust Engel Findley Award, which recognizes the accomplishments of a predominantly fiction writer in the middle of their career.
Thien, based in Montreal, is a short story writer and novelist. She is the author of the novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing, which won the Giller Prize and the Governor General's Award in 2016 and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Her debut novel, Certainty, published in 2006, was a finalist for the 2007 Kiriyama Prize. Thien's other books include the novel Dogs at the Perimeter and children's book The Chinese Violin.
In her acceptance speech, Thien said she planned to donate the entirety of her $25,000 prize win in three parts: firstly to charities including the Woodcock Fund, which supports Canadian writers in need when they face emergencies; the second part to the Palestine Children's Relief Fund, and the third part to the Lebanese Red Cross.
Rita Wong received the Latner Griffin Award, $60,000 given to a mid-career poet in anticipation of their future contributions to Canadian poetry.
Wong is a Vancouver-based poet and scholar of ecological justice and decolonization. Her books include undercurrent, perpetual, sybil unrest and forage, which won the 2008 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. She won the Jim Wong-Chu Emerging Writers Award and is an associate professor at Emily Carr University of Art and Design.
"As the writer Lee Maracle taught so many of us, we have a responsibility to learn and to uphold the laws of the Coast Salish people when we are living on Coast Salish homelands. Part of how I have carried this teaching is to attend to the question of what it means to respect and care for the waters flowing through and enlivening these sacred lands," said writer and poet Erica Isomura who represented Wong in her absence.
Sara O'Leary was awarded the Vicky Metcalf Award for Literature for Young People, a $25,000 prize, in recognition of her lifetime achievement in children's literature.
O'Leary is a writer based in New Brunswick. She is the author children's books including A Kid is a Kid is a Kid, illustrated by Qin Leng, Owls Are Good at Keeping Secrets, illustrated by Jacob Grant, A Family Is a Family Is a Family, also illustrated by Qin Leng, and This Is Sadie, illustrated by Julie Morstad. The Ghost in the House is her first novel.
"Everyone in this room knows that nobody writes a book alone. My husband, Daniel O'Leary, is here with me tonight, and he's the first person I want to thank," said O'Leary in her speech.
"My beautiful kids aren't here tonight...[they] are the reason I began writing picture books, and writing for children is one of the many joys I would have missed out without them."
