Brother wins $50,000 fiction prize

Writers’ Trust awards honour Canadian authors

David Chariandy’s novel, TORONTO Brother, has won the $50,000 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.

Brother is a coming-of-age story about two siblings, the sons of Trinidadian immigrants, who confront violence and prejudice in a Toronto housing complex.

In a video introducing the book shown during the ceremony, Chariandy said that while the story is fictional, he drew on his own experiences of growing up black in Toronto’s east end.

“Writing this novel might be imagined to be a way of working through the vulnerability I felt growing up,” he said, “and the possibility that life would take an ugly turn.”

Jury members, who selected Brother from 141 submitted novels and short story collections, praised Chariandy’s “stunning lyrical writing, pitch perfect pacing, and unexpected humour.”

Chariandy said he hopes readers walk away from the book with “a greater understanding of the complexity of their cities and suburbs.”

The $60,000 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Non-fiction went to Toronto-based writer and doctor James Maskalyk for Life on the Ground Floor: Letters from the Edge of Emergency Medicine. It examines emergency rooms in different cultures, focusing on Maskalyk’s work in hospitals in Toronto and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Sharon Bala’s short story Butter Tea at Starbucks won the $10,000 Writers’ Trust/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize, given to an emerging writer.

The other awards — each worth $25,000 — honoured authors for their careers to date, rather than for one specific work.

Saskatoon poet Louise Bernice Halfe received the Latner Writers’ Trust Poetry Prize for her four collections detailing her time in residential schools.

Thunder Bay, Ont., author Ruby Slipperjack won the Vicky Metcalf Award for Literature for Young People. Diane Schoemperlen won the Matt Cohen Award and Billie Livingston won the Trust Engel/ Findley Award for their bodies of work.