The Floundering by Romy Ash
The Beloved by Annah Faulkner
Questions of Travel by Michelle de Kretser
The Mountain by Drusilla Modjeska
Mateship with Birds by Carrie Tiffany

The winner will be announced June 19th at the National Library of Australia.

The Orphan Master’s Son is only Johnson’s third novel (after Emporium and Parasites like Us) but he has also published a number of short stories which have appeared in Harper’s, Esquire and various Reviews.  In addition to today’s Pulitzer prize Johnson has previously won the Debut Writer of the Year from Amazon.com in 2002, and was recently awarded a National Endowment for the Arts.

As with most Pulitzer Prize winning books, sales for The Orphan Master’s Son are expected to climb in coming days.  AbeBooks.com has already seen a spike in the sale of signed copies of The Orphan Master’s Son on AbeBooks.com directly after the award was announced this afternoon.

Other finalists for the Fiction prize were  What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank  by Nathan Englander and The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey. In other awards Sharon Olds won the poetry award for her collection Stag’s Leap and Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America by Gilbert King was given the non-fiction prize.

Some of the winners included:
Doors in the Air by David Weale - Children (tie)
Everyone Eats by Julia Kuo – Children (tie)
Handfuls of Bone by Monica Kidd – Poetry
Love and the Mess We’re In by Stephen Marche - Fiction
Little Black Lies: Corporate & Political Spin in the Global War for Oil by Jeff Gailus - Non-fiction (tie)
The Energy of Slaves: Oil and the New Servitude by Andrew Nikiforuk – Non-fiction (tie)

We love the BC Book Prizes here at AbeBooks. Granted, we’re a bit biased, given that we make our headquarters in British Columbia’s capital city (Victoria). But the prizes really are something special, highlighting the best written talent this beautiful province has to offer in seven categories: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, regional, children’s literature, illustrated children’s literature, and booksellers’ choice.

It’s now been 10 years that AbeBooks has been a proud sponsor of the prizes, in the Hubert Evans Award for Non-fiction category, and we couldn’t be more pleased to be along for the ride. A few years back I was lucky enough to attend the awards gala and dinner, and had such a memorable evening. Being in a room with so much talent and creativity is inspiring and humbling.

If you’re wondering who Hubert Evans was, he was born in 1892, and actually began his life in Ontario, not British Columbia, but moved to this province, in Roberts Creek, BC, in his early adulthood. Margaret Laurence called him “the elder of our tribe”. He was a Quaker, an avid outdoorsman, and a prolific writer. In the 70 active years of his career, he completed no fewer than 200 short stories, as well as several novels, plays, books of poetry and more, before his death in 1986. He is remembered and revered among writers, in BC, the rest of Canada, and beyond. That’s him pictured at left, on the cover of his biography: Hubert Evans: The First Ninety-Three Years by Alan Twigg.

Here are the finalists for the 2013 BC Book Prizes, in the non-fiction and fiction categories:

Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize

The Art of the Impossible: Dave Barrett and the NDP in Power, 1972-1975 by Geoff Meggs, Rod Mickleburgh

Into the Abyss: How a Deadly Plane Crash Changed the Lives of a Pilot, a Politician, a Criminal and a Cop by Carol Shaben

Journey with No Maps: A Life of P.K. Page by Sandra Djwa

The Light through the Trees: Reflections on Land and Farming by Luanne Armstrong

Pinboy by George Bowering

Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize

Floating Like the Dead by Yasuko Thanh

Gay Dwarves of America by Anne Fleming

Malarky by Anakana Schofield

Psychology and Other Stories by C.P. Boyko

The World by Bill Gaston

The winners of all seven categories will be announced at the Lieutenant Governor’s BC Book Prizes Gala on Saturday, May 4, 2013, at Government House in Victoria. Congratulations and best of luck to all the finalists!

As of now in 2013, Doris Lessing is 93. She was born in 1919 and her second novel, published in 1956, was titled Retreat to Innocence. All of this, coupled with her round, sweetly wrinkled face and penchant for wearing her white hair parted at the middle and pulled back into a bun, might give one preconceived notions about her temperament, character and preferred subject matter. But if you’ve read Doris Lessing’s work, you’ll know she is no kindly, simple old lady doling out pearls of grandmotherly wisdom. Her writing is shrewd, difficult, complex, and nuanced, and has even been called inaccessible. It is as challenging to read as it is enjoyable. She has earned countless literary awards, including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007.

The Zimbabwe-born author is also not one to shy away from controversy, whether in reference to her politics – she was prohibited from entry to South Africa and Rhodesia for vocally protesting apartheid and nuclear armament – or her outspoken comments to those who would pigeonhole her as a femnist writer. Labelled a feminist by critics and readers time and time again, Lessing has repeatedly lashed out in response to the term, expressing extreme distaste for her perspective of trends toward the belittlement of men and male writers, under the guise of empowerment of their female counterparts. She has repeatedly stated that she finds the term and its followers grotesquely oversimplified, and wishes to distance herself from it.

That said, much or her writing inarguably empowers women, and she writes bravely about issues of gender and sex without batting an eyelash. Perhaps the most notable example is her 2003 novella The Grandmothers. In it, Lessing tells the story of two middle-aged women, best friends since childhood, inseparable for decades. The two grow up together, intentionally marry two men who are friends, and move in next door to one another. Eventually, when the two husbands are out of the picture, each woman begins an affair – with her best friend’s teenage son.

It sounds like the stuff of a juicy and perhaps distasteful romance novel. That alone might make one uncomfortable, but when squirm-worthy subject matter is put in the hands of a skilled writer like Lessing, it becomes more interesting, less black and white, and harder to ignore. The story is surprisingly Ask anyone who has read Lolita – a talented wordsmith can be expert at challenging our absolutes and making a reader question his or her own certainties and opinions.

It is likely that complexity and challenge that attracted French filmmaker Anne Fontaine to option the project, and it will be her first English-language film as director. The film adaptation is set and filmed in Australia, and is called Two Mothers. It premiered at Sundance in January, and so far is scheduled for various very limited release worldwide throughout 2013.

Here is a taste:

The 2012 prize has been announced, and the lucky recipient is Canadian author Nancy Huston, for her novel Infrared. The Calgary-born Huston chose to include a passage describing a threesome between the novel’s heroine (a photographer), her lover (a man), and….her camera…? According the the judges, part of Huston emerging victorious over the other bad-sex nominees was her overuse of the word “undulating”. Oh, I say.

The Bad Sex Awards came to be in 1993 and were established by journalist Auberon Waugh in an effort to shine a shaming spotlight onto the hideously repetitive and cliched ways authors write about sex, and in the hopes of encouraging betterment. Works of intentional eroticism are excluded, meaning that Shades of Grey book went without notice in at least one literary circle this year.

Congratulations, Nancy Huston! Sort of.

It tells the story of Shannon, born to a mother in the midst of turmoil and subsequently left behind at the door of the YMCA, where a man is quietly watching from his vehicle. The story is gripping from the get-go, and very hard to put down, as readers and critics far and wide have agreed.

Just 31 years old, one might expect Celona to be head-in-the-clouds giddy with all the attention, but she remains firmly rooted to the ground and down-to-Earth. We got to catch up with her and hear all about her sense of belonging, growing up on Vancouver Island, her favorite books, and how it is essential to work with a dog at (or on) one’s feet. Read on for an interview with Marjorie Celona.

Back in 1937, the first Governor General’s Literary Award came into being under Lord Tweedsmuir (also known as prolific author John Buchan). Originally, they were awarded to English-language authors only, and just two per year.

To celebrate 75 years of the Governor General’s Literary Awards, the world’s most extensive collection of Governor General Award for Fiction winners in the world is currently on display at the University of Toronto. The collection belongs to John H. Meier of the W.A. Deacon Literary Foundation. It consists of over 500 volumes and includes numerous highly rare and collectible editions such as galleys, uncorrected proofs, trial dust jackets, advance review copies, association copies, author copies, and more.

The collection is on display now at U of T’s Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, and will be until December 21st. The Fisher Library houses the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, and has been in its present location – a brief walk from where the first GGLA was presented by Lord Tweedsmuir in 1937 – for just shy of 40 years.

For any lover of rare and collectible books, avid reader or Canadian history buff, this exhibit will be a rare feast.

University of Toronto
Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library
120 St. George Street, Toronto, Ontario
October 8th to December 21st, 2012
Library open: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday 9am-5pm Thursday 9am-8pm Closed weekends.

Congratulations to Hilary Mantel. As predicted by many, her novel Bring up the Bodies has just been announced in London’s Guildhall as the winner of this year’s £50,000 Man Booker Prize award. This also means that signed copies of Bring Up the Bodies will increase in value very quickly, so jump on it if you want one.

The announcement makes Mantel the first British author ever to be awarded the Booker Prize twice (she won previously in 2009 for Wolf Hall). Both Peter Carey (Australia) and J.M. Coetzee (South Africa) have won the prize twice.

The Booker Prize judges had the simultaneously daunting and enviable task of selecting just 12 semi-finalists for the longlist, down from a list of 145 submissions. Then from the 12 that made the longlist, they cut away half, leaving just six novels for the shortlist, including the winner. The other five finalists consisted of:

Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil
Swimming Home by Deborah Levy
The Lighthouse by Alison Moore
Umbrella by Will Self
The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng

All six of the shortlisted authors receive £2,500.

The Booker Prize was first awarded in 1969, and goes to the judges’ determination of best English language full-length novel. There were some murmurs and grumbles of dissent last year around that rule, as the 2011 award went to Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending which many assert should be classified as a novella at only 150 pages.

Enormous admiration and congratulations to the winner, the finalists, and even all those who made the longlist – an astonishing accomplishment, and a sign of excellent literature. We will be sure to read as many as we can.

At the same gala on October 12th, author Caitlyn Vernon was awarded the 5th annual Bolen Books Children’s Book Prize for her celebrated work Nowhere Else on Earth; Standing Tall for the Great Bear Rainforest. Her offering is a stunningly beautiful collection of information, stories and images from BC’s central coastal rainforest, with a mind to protect and preserve.

Each author was awarded $5,000.