Zarqa Nawaz and Emily Riddle among finalists for 2023 High Plains Book Awards
The awards recognizes regional literary works about life on the High Plains
Zarqa Nawaz and Emily Riddle are among the 13 Canadians nominated for the 2023 High Plains Book Awards.
Established in 2006, the annual awards recognize regional authors and/or literary works that examine and reflect life on the High Plains in North America. The regions include the Canadian provinces Manitoba, Alberta and Saskatchewan and the United States of North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska, Colorado and Kansas.
The award program recognizes books in 13 categories, including nonfiction, fiction, poetry, children's books, photography and short stories.
The winner of each award will be announced at an event in October in Billings, Mont., and will receive $500 and a commemorative plaque.
Nawaz is nominated for her book Jameela Green Ruins Everything in the fiction category.
In Jameela Green Ruins Everything, Nawaz tells the story of a young woman named Jameela Green whose biggest dream is to see her memoir become a bestseller. When that dream doesn't come true, she becomes involved in her local mosque, which inadvertently leads her to becoming intertwined with a plot to infiltrate an international terrorist organization. It is a dark comedy that explores success, searching for meaning and community, and the failures of American foreign policy.
Nawaz is a film and TV producer, writer and former broadcaster based in Regina. She is the creator of the CBC television show Little Mosque on the Prairie. She is also the author of the memoir Laughing All the Way to the Mosque, which was shortlisted for the 2015 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour, and her novel Jameela Green Ruins Everything was longlisted in 2023 for the same award. Nawaz also wrote the 2022 CBC TV series called Zarqa which can be streamed on CBC Gem.
Listen | Zarqa Nawaz on Jameela Green Ruins Everything:
Riddle is nominated for her debut poetry collection The Big Melt in the poetry category.
The Big Melt is part memoir, part research project and draws on Riddle's experience working in Indigenous governance and her affection for confessional poetry in crafting feminist works that are firmly rooted in place. It is ingrained in nêhiyaw thought and urban millennial life events. It examines what it means to repair kinship, contend with fraught history, go home and contemplate prairie and utopia in the era of late capitalism and climate change.
Riddle is a nêhiyaw writer who is a member of the Alexander First Nation (Kipohtakaw) in Treaty Six Territory. She is the senior advisor of Indigenous relations at the Edmonton Public Library and has been published in various publications such as The Washington Post, The Globe and Mail, Teen Vogue, The Malahat Review and Room Magazine. She won the first-ever Griffin Poetry Prize Canadian First Book Prize for The Big Melt in 2022, and her CBC Poetry Prize entry, Learning to Count, that's featured in The Big Melt, made the 2020 CBC Poetry Prize shortlist.
Valley of the Birdtail: An Indian Reserve, a White Town, and the Road to Reconciliation by Douglas Sanderson (Amo Binashii) and Andrew Stobo Sniderman is nominated in the Indigenous Writer category.
In Valley of the Birdtail, Sanderson (Binashii) and Sniderman tell the true story about two communities — Rossburn Town and the Waywayseecappo Indian reserve — who live side by side but are divided by racism and inequality and how this separation came to be.
It follows multiple generations of one white family and one Indigenous family, which reflects the larger story of Canada and the issues in relations between Indigenous people and non-Indigenous people in Canada. The book concludes with hope for a better future.
Sanderson (Binashii) is Swampy Cree, Beaver clan, of the Opaskwayak Cree Nation. He is an associate professor and The Prichard Wilson Chair in Law & Public Policy in the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto. He served as senior advisor to the Government of Ontario — to the minister of Indigenous affairs and the attorney general.
Sniderman is a Montreal-based writer, lawyer and Rhodes Scholar. He has been published in the New York Times, Maclean's and the Globe and Mail. He has also worked for a judge in South Africa's Constitutional Court and provided human rights policy advising to the Canadian minister of foreign affairs.
Listen | Andrew Stobo Sniderman and Douglas Sanderson on Valley of the Birdtail:
Here is the full list of Canadian finalists:
Creative Nonfiction
Fiction
Indigenous Writer
Poetry
Short Stories
- Not the Apocalypse I Was Hoping For by Leslie Greentree
- The Term Between by Brady Harrison
Woman Writer
- Black Umbrella by Katherine Lawrence
- The Apothecary's Garden by Jeanette Lynes
Children's Picture Book
- Buddy: A Farm in the Forest Story by Jena Wagmann
- What If You Could? by Lynne Harley
Children's Middle Grade
Young Adult Book
- Behind the Label: Gloria and Willa by Lorna Schultz Nicholson
- The Emir's Falcon by Matt Hughes
Visit the High Plains Book Awards' website for the full list of finalists.
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