Here are all the winners of the 2024 Canadian Writers’ Trust literary prizes.
Yesterday in Toronto, the Writers’ Trust of Canada recognized the country’s best books and authors with the distribution of seven annually-given prizes.
For his second novel, Batshit Seven, the novelist Sheung-King received the highly coveted Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction prize. The $60,000 award recognizes the year’s best novel or story collection. Following a “lackluster, hungover ESL teacher” who observes a conflict-torn Hong Kong, Batshit Seven taps into a collective Millennial anhedonia, familiar to all subjects of empire.
On the nonfiction end, jurors recognized the essayist Martha Baillie with the $75,000 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Award. Baillie’s award-winning memoir, There is No Blue, is an elegiac collection of three pieces on loss.
The third book prize presented was the Dayne Ogilvie Prize for 2SLGBTQ+ emerging writers. Anthony Oliveira, a Toronto-based author and critic, took home $12,000 for Dayspring, a “bold reimagining of biblical tales that weaves together stories of passion, grief and destruction.”
The four finalists for the Atwood Gibson will also each receive $5,000, because Canada stays so nice.
Recognized books and authors include Éric Chacour, for his heartbreaking Egypt-set 1960s epic, What I Know About You, translated by Pablo Strauss; Conor Kerr for his mis-adventurous tale of bison run amok, Prairie Edge; Canisia Lubrin for her genre-bending debut collection, Code Noir, and Fawn Parker for Hi, It’s Me—a provocative look at grief.
In addition to book-specific prizes, four other authors won career awards. For a lifetime of distinguished work in several disciplines, the multidisciplinary writer/producer Marie Clements received the $40,000 Matt Cohen Award.
Author Madeleine Thien took home the $25,000 Writers’ Trust Engel Findley Award, given to mid-career fiction writers.
Rita Wong received the $60,000 Latner Griffin Award, given to a mid-career Canadian poet.
And Sara O’Leary was awarded the Vicky Metcalf Award for Literature for Young People, a $25,000 prize.
Congratulations to all the winners! Now, go read some Canadian literature!
Image via
