Ontario book news, interviews and more
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May 11, 2022Amazon Canada First Novel Award Shortlist Announced
Yesterday, Amazon Canada and The Walrus announced the shortlist for the forty-sixth annual Amazon Canada First Novel Award, which rewards the debut novel judged to be the finest of the year based on literary ...
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May 10, 2022Genres You Didn’t Learn About in Kidlit 101
One of the most formative experiences in my development as a writer was working in a bookstore. For four glorious years I was the manager of the award-winning, much beloved Flying Dragon Bookshop in Toronto. ...
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May 10, 2022"No Novel is Perfect" Anita Anand on Learning & Loving the Novel Form
In Anita Anand's A Convergence of Solitudes, the experience of separation, partition, and the longing that divisions can create spirals through multiple generations of a single family and the people ...
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May 09, 2022Read an Excerpt from Booker Nominated Irish Icon Patrick McCabe's New Novel in Free Verse, Poguemahone
Booker nominated writer Patrick McCabe is a modern Irish literary treasure, with titles like The Butcher Boy and Breakfast on Pluto in his personal library (both of which were adapted into acclaimed ...
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May 08, 2022
Something New Under the Sun
"Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself—it is the occurring which is difficult."~Stephen Leacock, Canadian HumoristI recently attended ...
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May 05, 2022"Our World is an Amazing Place" Laura Alary on Her New Kids' Book Exploring Photosynthesis, Food, & Connection
It's easy to forget how fascinating the idea that plants can "eat" sunlight and use it to grow and thrive actually is, but in Laura Alary's Sun in My Tummy (Pajama Press, with artwork by Andrea Blinick) ...
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May 05, 2022
Nothing to do: Boredom and the Death of Imagination
“The World,” Wordsworth wrote, “is too much with us.” That was in the early nineteenth century, before television, before ubiquitous billboards along roadways, before social media. These days, ...
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May 04, 2022Darcy Whitecrow & Heather M. O’Connor on Partnering to Tell a Story About the Unique & Endangered Ojibwe Horse Breed
The Ojibwe Horse was a unique type of wild horse, bred and cherished by the people they are named for. For centuries, Ojibwe people husbanded the horses, living and working together with them, until ...
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May 04, 2022Writers' Trust Announces Fiction & Poetry Shortlists for 2022 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award
This morning the Writers’ Trust of Canada announced six finalists for the prestigious RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, with three nominated for the poetry award and three for the short ...
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May 03, 2022Both Art and Relationships are "Liminal, Ever Evolving, & Expose Our Vulnerabilities": Melanie Mitzner on Her 90s-Set Debut Novel
The 90s may (somehow) be thirty years ago now, but in Melanie Mitzner's Slow Reveal (Inanna Publications), where are whisked back to the final decade of the 20th century for an intense family portrait ...
