Two former students of the Alberta College of Art and Design have been named finalists for Governor General’s Literary Awards in the children’s literature (illustration) category. Renata Liwska a children’s book author and illustrator who lives in Calgary is a finalist for Once Upon a Memory with text by Nina Laden (Little Brown and Company). Jillian Tamaki who currently resides in New York is a finalist for This One Summer with text by her sister Mariko who is a finalist in the children’s literature (text) category (read our review).
Those two finalists join two others with Alberta connections including Thomas King of Ontario who previously taught at the University of Lethbridge and Maureen Labonté of Montreal who is co-director of the Banff Playwrights’ Colony. King is the finalist in the fiction category for The Back of the Turtle (HarperCollins Publishers) and Labonté is a finalist in the translation category for And Slowly Beauty (Talonbooks).
Calgarians will have a chance to see King and some of the other GG finalists at Wordfest the annual literary festival running in Calgary and Banff from October 14 to 19 including: Michael Crummey (Sweetland) Edmund Metatawabin (Up Ghost River) Jonathan Auxier (The Night Gardener) and Marianne Dubuc (Le lion et l’oiseau).
Wordfest’s lineup also includes authors in the running for three other prestigious prizes including: Scotiabank Giller Prize — Sean Michaels (Us Conductors) Miriam Toews (All My Puny Sorrows) Padma Viswanathan (The Ever After of Ashwin Rao) and Heather O’Neill (The Girl Who Was Saturday Night); Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction — Kathleen Winter (Boundless: Chasing Land and Dream in a New Northwest Passage) and Naomi Klein (This Changes Everything); and Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize — Carrie Snyder (Girl Runner) and Toews (All My Puny Sorrows).
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