Ontario book news, interviews and more

2021 Scotiabank Giller Shortlist Announced

The Scotiabank Giller Prize has announced their five-title 2021 shortlist, featuring four novels and one short story collection. The list features books from two independent Canadian publishers (House ...

Celebrate Latin American Heritage Month by Entering to Win Great Kids' Books from Groundwood Books

October is Latin American Heritage Month in Canada and we're excited to celebrate the wealth of great literature by Latin American writers, courtesy of Groundwood Books. Just in time for cozy reading ...

BIRTHDAY GIRL

I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow; but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.― Agatha ChristieIt ...

AN OCTOBER TO REMEMBER

Odò ti ó bá gbàgbé orisun gbi gbẹ ló ngbẹ.― Yoruba ProverbWelcome to my October To Remember! It is an absolute pleasure to be Open Book’s October 2021 writer-in-residence. If you missed ...

"Stories Find Those Who Believe in Them" Welcoming Our October Writer-in-Residence, Acclaimed Novelist Yejide Kilanko

Yejide Kilanko's new novel A Good Name (Guernica Editions) tells the complex story of a tumultuous marriage. Frustrated after twelve unfulfilling years in America, Eziafa returns home to Nigeria to ...

Helen Humphreys' Field Study Digs Through History Via the Connection Between People and Plants

Whether you've got a home filled with flourishing plant babies or a few bits of dried wheat in a jar, it's hard to deny the power of plants have to effect our mood and surroundings. Field Study: Meditations ...

Chanel M. Sutherland's "Umbrella", a Powerful Glimpse of Black Girlhood, Wins 2021 CBC Nonfiction Prize

Chanel M. Sutherland of Montreal has captured the 2021 CBC Nonfiction Prize for her tense and compelling piece "Umbrella", which explores racial microaggressions in a complicated friendship between Sutherland's ...

Inaugural Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize Shortlist Announced

The recently renamed and significantly enriched Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize (formerly the Writers' Trust Fiction Prize) has announced its first official shortlist with five heavy-hitter ...

"To See the Extraordinary in the Everyday is a Super Power" Eliza Martin on Her Debut Children's Book & Its Hopeful Heroine

In Eliza Martin's Harvey and the Extraordinary (Annick Press, illustrated by Anna Bron), Mimi is determined to become the world's great mime. With her trusty hamster by her side, she practices her act ...

On Synchronicity, or: a Set of Emergent/Entangled Influences

Moments of liberation—such as those of revolutionary rupture, or personal “peak experiences”—matter enormously, insofar as they remind us that conditions that once seemed fixed are not, and create ...