Yiddish for Pirates wins Hamilton book award
Evenings and Weekends takes spirit prize
Novelist Gary Barwin, poet Chris Pannell, history writer Shawn Selway and music writer Andrew Baulcomb won Hamilton Literary Awards Monday night during a gala at Theatre Aquarius.
Barwin took home the award in the fiction category for his critically acclaimed debut novel “Yiddish for Pirates, (Random House Canada),” which earlier this year also won the $15,000 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour.
“Yiddish for Pirates,” which tells the story of a 15th century boy who leaves home to join a ship’s crew, was also a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Barwin has won three previous HLAs for poetry.
“To be recognized in your hometown, the place where I live and work, is really important to me,” Barwin told The Spectator after the ceremony. “This is really a community event recognizing so many talented artists, and it’s a pleasure to be recognized alongside them.”
Selway, a Stelco-trained millwright with a B.A. in religious studies from McMaster University, won in the non-fiction category for his “Nobody Here Will Harm You,” the story of the medical evacuation of 1,274 Inuit and Cree tuberculosis patients from the Eastern Arctic to Mountain Sanatorium in Hamilton from 1950 to 1965.
Baulcomb, who works as a communications officer for McMaster, and was a summer student at The Spectator in 2010, was presented with the Kerry Schooley Award for best capturing “the spirit of Hamilton” in his book “Evenings and Weekends: Five Years in Hamilton Music 2006-11.”
Chris Pannell won the poetry category for his collection “Love, Despite the Ache.” It was Pannell’s third Hamilton Literary Award, having also won the Kerry Schooley Award in 2015 for his “Nervous City” and the poetry award in 2009 for “Drive.”
The winners for the 24th annual HLAs, organized by the Hamilton Arts Council, were announced at a gala reception, hosted by CBC Radio’s Jeff Goodes, at Theatre Aquarius’ Norman and Louise Haac Studio. Winners in the poetry, fiction and non-fiction categories receive a cash prize of $300, while the Kerry Schooley Award carries a $450 prize. Three of the four winners — Baulcomb, Selway and Pannell — were published by Hamilton’s Wolsak & Wynn, located on James Street North. Runners-up in the poetry category were “Earth Day in Leith Churchyard: Poems in Search of Tom Thomson,” by Bernadette Rule and “After Hours” by Darrell Epp. Other finalists in the fiction category were “Freedom’s Just Another Word,” by Caroline Stellings; “Saints, Unexpected,” by Brent Van Staalduinen; and “Captain of Kinnoull Hill,” by Jamie Tennant.
Other finalists in the non-fiction category were: Baulcomb’s “Evenings and Weekends,” and “People and the Bay,” by Nancy Bouchier and Ken Cruikshank. Finalists for the Kerry Schooley Award also included Selway, Van Staalduinen, and Mark Osbaldeston for “Unbuilt Hamilton.”
To be recognized in your hometown ... is really important ... AUTHOR GARY BARWIN