Congratulations to the winners of the 2017 Literary Awards

The winners were announced at our annual literary awards dinner and gala held in Toronto on June 24, 2017.

 

Canadian Authors Award for Fiction

Winner: Alissa York for The Naturalist (Randomhouse Canada)

Alissa York’s internationally acclaimed novels include Mercy, Effigy (short-listed for the Scotiabank Giller Prize), Fauna and, most recently, The Naturalist. York is also the author of the short fiction collection, Any Given Power, stories from which have won the Journey Prize and the Bronwen Wallace Award. Her essays and articles have appeared in The Guardian, Brick magazine, Canadian Geographic and elsewhere. York has lived all over Canada and now makes her home in Toronto with her husband, artist Clive Holden.

 

 

Canadian Authors Award for Poetry

Winner: Johanna Skibsrud for The Description of the World (Wolsak and Wynn)

Johanna Skibsrud is the author of two previous collections of poetry, I Do Not Think that I Could Love a Human Being and Late Nights With Wild Cowboys; two novels, Quartet for the End of Time and the 2010 Scotiabank Giller Prize–winning novel The Sentimentalists; and the short fiction collection This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories. An Assistant Professor of English at the University of Arizona, Skibsrud and her family divide their time between Tucson and Cape Breton.

 

 

Canadian Authors Award for Canadian History

Winner: Charlotte Gray for The Promise of Canada (Simon & Schuster Canada)

Charlotte Gray is the author of ten acclaimed books of literary non-fiction, including The Massey Murder and Gold Diggers, Striking It Rich in the Klondike. Charlotte’s 1999 bestseller Sisters in the Wilderness was named as one of the 25 most influential Canadian books of the past 25 years by the Literary Review of Canada. Born in Sheffield, and educated at Oxford University and the London School of Economics, Charlotte worked as a political commentator, book reviewer and magazine columnist before she turned to biography and popular history. An adjunct research professor at Carleton University, in Ottawa, she is a member of the Order of Canada and lives in Ottawa.

 

Canadian Authors Emerging Writer Award

Winner: Eva Crocker

Eva Crocker’s stories have been published in Riddle Fence, The Overcast, and The Telegram’s Cuffer Anthology. Barrelling Forward was shortlisted for the 2015 RBC Fresh Fish Award for Emerging Writers. Crocker recently completed a Master’s Degree in English Literature at Memorial University.

 

 

 

 

Canadian Authors Fred Kerner Book Award

Winner: Margo Wheaton for The Unlit Path Behind the House (McGill-Queen’s University Press)

Note: McGill-Queen’s University Press was incorrectly identified as Queen’s University Press in the awards announcement e-mail. The Canadian Authors Association apologizes for the error.

Margo Wheaton is a New Brunswick–born poet currently living in Halifax. Her poems have appeared in publications including Undercurrents: New Voices in Canadian Poetry, Poet to Poet and Landmarks: An Anthology of New Atlantic Canadian Poetry of the Land, and in periodicals including The Fiddlehead, PRISM, CV2, Event, Prairie Fire and The New Quarterly. Her essays and reviews have been found in The Globe and Mail, The Antigonish Review, The Coast and the Guernica Series on Writers.