Alberta Book Award winners
Edmonton writers and publishers took home their share of awards Saturday at the 2013 Alberta Book Awards Gala, which celebrated winners of both the Alberta Literary Awards and Alberta Book Publishing Awards.
The Alberta Literary Awards, doled out by the Writers’ Guild of Alberta, had a strong showing of local winners. Edmonton author Richard Van Camp won the Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction with his book Godless But Loyal to Heaven (Enfield & Wizenty) while LitFest producer David Cheoros claimed the Gwen Pharis Ringwood Award for Drama for his play Invisible Child.
Poet Nora Gould won the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry for her debut collection I See My Love More Clearly from a Distance (Brick Books). Gould’s collection also earned her the 2013 City of Edmonton Book Prize.
Spruce Grove’s Joan Marie Galat won the R. Ross Annett Award for Children’s Literature for The Discovery of Longitude (Pelican Publishing).
The Wilfrid Eggleston Award for Nonfiction went to Calgary writer Marcello Di Cintio for Walls: Travels Along the Barricades (Goose Lane Editions). Di Cintio also won the James H. Gray Award for Short Nonfiction for his story A Hymn in Aramaic, which appeared in Alberta Views magazine.
Okotoks writer Lee Kvern won the Howard O’Hagan Award for Short Story for her piece In Search of Lucinda, and Edmonton’s Sydney Budgeon won the Amber Bowerman Memorial Travel Writing Award for The Unfinished. Elizabeth Haynes of Calgary was the winner of the Jon Whyte Memorial Essay Award for “Memoria, Justicia, Sin Olvido.”
The Golden Pen Lifetime Achievement Award went to cultural historian George Melnyk.
The Alberta Book Publishing Awards, given out by the Book Publishers Association of Alberta, saw a fairly even split between north and south. Edmonton’s NeWest Press won two BPAA awards including the Trade-Non-fiction Book Award for Those Who Know: Profiles of Alberta’s Aboriginal Elders by Dianne Meili, and the Robert Kroetsch Poetry Book Award for Restless White Fields by Barbara Langhorst.
Calgary’s Freehand Books, an imprint of Broadview Press, won the Trade Fiction Book Award for The Crimes of Hector Tomás by Ian Colford. That publisher also won the Lois Hole Award for Editorial Excellence thanks to the editing skills of Robyn Reed on Every Wolf’s Howl: A Memoir by Barry Grills.
Freehand won both of BPAA’s design awards thanks to Natalie Olsen of Kiss Cut Design’s cover design for Personals by Ian Williams and her book design for Seen Reading by Julie Wilson. The BPAA Children & Young Adult Book Award went to Banff’s Tiberius Publishing for From Blue to Red by Ross McIntyre.
The University of Calgary Press got the Scholarly and Academic Book Award for Wendy Dathan’s The Reindeer Botanist: Alf Erling Porsild, and the Education Book Award went to Edmonton’s NS Group for Ten Steps to Help You Write Better Essays and Term Papers by Neil Sawers.
CBC broadcaster Shelagh Rogers gave the keynote address at the gala, at Edmonton’s Delta Centre Suite Hotel.