Edugyan in hunt for $50,000 Rogers prize
Washington Black also on Man Booker shortlist, Giller Prize long list
Esi Edugyan has hit a trifecta with her book Washington Black, which has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, longlisted for the Giller Prize and, now, named a finalist for the $50,000 Rogers Writers’ Trust prize.
The shortlist for the other big prize of the season, the Governor Generals’ Literary Award, will be announced on Oct. 3.
Meantime, fellow Giller nominee Rawi Hage also appears on the list for this Writers’ Trust award, now being presented for the 22nd time.
Each finalist will receive $5,000.
Those other finalists are: The Saturday Night Ghost Club by Craig Davidson, a coming-ofage novel set in Niagara Falls, with ghosts, grief and growing up providing the backdrop, published by Knopf Canada; Edugyan’s Washington Black, which the Star’s reviewer described as “a cinematic epic of slavery and freedom, it’s also a tale of high adventure and scientific endeavour” (Patrick Crean Editions); Hage for Beirut Hellfire Society, the story of an undertaker in 1970s wartorn Beirut that also been longlisted for the Giller Prize (Knopf Canada); Jen Neale’s debut book Land Mammals and Sea Creatures (ECW Press), which evolved from a short story that won the Writers’ Trust’s 2011 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers and evolved into this book; and Kathy Page for Dear Evelyn (Biblioasis), inspired by her own parents’ long marriage and love letters.
Authors Ann Y.K. Choi, Mireille Silcoff and Robert Wiersema served as the jury, choosing from 128 books submitted by 28 publishers across the country.
As in previous years, this prize will be handed out in a gala Writers’ Trust prize night at the Glenn Gould Studio in Toronto on Nov. 7, where the winners of other prizes will also be named — and more than $260,000 will be awarded to Canadian authors.
Those other prizes include the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, the Writers’ Trust/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize for best short story, the Latner Writers’ Trust Poetry Prize, and the Vicky Metcalf Award for Literature for Young People.