WINNERS

2004

Short Story

First Prize - English
Michael Winter - The Point David Made Earlier

Michael Winter grew up in Newfoundland, where he was a paperboy, a city planner, and a trap shoot operator. He decided to try writing when his sister got a rejection slip from a magazine, and the editor’s note said "interesting, if a little cryptic". The idea of being elusive and ambiguous appealed to him. His first novel, This All Happened, won the inaugural Winterset Award and was nominated for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. His fourth book, The Big Why, was chosen by the Globe and Mail as one of the Top 100 books for 2004. Michael Winter now lives in Toronto where he’s at work on a new book.

Second Prize - English
Caroline Adderson - Falling

Caroline Adderson grew up in Alberta but has been a Vancouverite now for many years. Her first book, Bad Imaginings (The Porcupine’s Quill 1993), was nominated for a 1993 Governor General’s Literature Award, the 1994 Commonwealth Book Prize and won the 1994 Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Adderson's first novel, A History of Forgetting (Key Porter 1999), was nominated for the Rogers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Her second, Sitting Practice (Thomas Allen), won the 2004 Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. She is currently at work on a collection of short stories.

First Prize - French
Estelle Bérubé - Place Liman

Born in 1955 in the Lower St. Lawrence region, Estelle Bérubé has been living in Montreal since 1989. She has a bachelor’s degree in second-language training and, since 1992, has been working for the Minister of Immigration teaching French to allophones. In 2003, she completed a master’s degree in literary creation, pursuing her childhood dream of becoming a writer. Travel is a major source of inspiration for Estelle Bérubé, who wrote her winning short story after returning from a trip to Turkey.

Second Prize - French
Lori Saint-Martin - Les portes closes

Born in 1959, Lori Saint-Martin is a professor of literary studies at UQAM, where she specializes in women’s literature. She has published numerous essays and two collections of short stories. With Paul Gagné, she has translated some twenty English-Canadian works, including Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall onYour Knees (Un parfum de cèdre), which won the Governor General’s Award for Translation in 2000. In 2004, she and Paul Gagné received the Quebec Writers’ Federation (QWF) award for their translation of Neil Bissoondath’s Doing the Heart Good (Un baume pour le cœur). Lori Saint-Martin has also translated Naomi Klein’s critically acclaimed book No Logo.

Poetry

First Prize - English
Asa Boxer - The Workshop

Asa Boxer was born and raised in Montreal. He lived in Israel for 10 years, during which period he pursued a BA in History and English Literature. He graduated with an MA from McGill's English Literature Department in the spring of 2004, and won McGill's Mona Adilman Prize for Poetry. Currently, he catalogues rare books and first editions for an online bookstore and writes the occasional book review for Books in Canada. He has a book upcoming in the Signal Editions series (Vehicule Press) and a chapbook in the works with Montreal Books Press.

Second Prize - English
Tonja Gunvaldsen Klaassen - August: an anniversary suite

Tonja Gunvaldsen Klaassen was born and raised on the prairies, where she learned, among other things, how to make relish and flapper pie. She studied literature at the University of Saskatchewan and since then has written two collections of poetry. Clay Birds, published by Coteau Books, was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award and won the Saskatchewan Poetry Award in 1996. Ör, published by Brick Books, won a John V. Hicks manuscript prize and was shortlisted for the 2004 Pat Lowther Award. She now lives in Halifax with her husband and their two little boys.

First Prize - French
Lise Gaboury-Diallo - Homestead

Professor, essayist and poet Lise Gaboury-Diallo was born in Winnipeg in 1957 and has a Ph.D. from the Sorbonne University, Paris IV (1987). She has taught language and literature at the Collège universitaire de Saint-Boniface for over 20 years and sits on the editorial board of Cahiers franco-canadiens de l’Ouest. In 1995, she published La littérature au féminin with Carol Harvey, an anthology of selected writings from the Middle Ages to the present day (Éditions Mondia). She has also written a piece on Gabrielle Roy for the Cercle Molière. Her two poetry collections, Subliminales and Transitions (Éditions du Blé), were finalists for the Rue-Deschambault literary award.

Second Prize - French
Gabriel Landry - L'œil au calendrier

Born in Havre-Saint-Pierre in 1964, Gabriel Landry grew up in Pointe-Parent, a small village located “at the end of the 138” on the North Shore. He now resides in Montreal. After spending five years working in a bookstore, he decided to switch careers and begin teaching in the community college system. He has been a literature professor at Collège Maisonneuve since 1995 and writes a poetry column in Voix et Images, the UQAM literary studies journal. Gabriel Landry is currently working on a book of poetry inspired by the city of Montreal.

Travel Writing

First Prize - English
Montana Jones - The Bus to Loja

Montana Jones is many kinds of women: bon vivant, raconteur, spinner of yarns, watcher of whales, saver of turtles, aficionado of jazzy-dub-fusion-techno music, wayfarer, shepherd, and former winner of the Sutton Agricultural Fair Spelling Bee.

She is currently living on a 100-acre Ontario farm, working from her Wholearth Farmstudio, and tending a flock of heritage Shropshire sheep and South African Boer goats. In recent years, she has received two Ontario Arts Council Writer’s Reserve Grants and had a story published in the Canadian Woman Studies Literary Journal.

Second Prize - English
Dorothea Belanger - Moccasins

Dorothea Belanger has spent the last twenty years sneaking around her responsibilities as parent and music teacher in Kenora, Ontario, to create art. Having found the 200 km commute to perform as a flutist in Winnipeg too taxing and not being handy enough to make quilts, Dorothea Belanger took a writing course with Carol Shields ten years ago and has been “playing with words ever since.”

First Prize - French
Monique Joachim - Alpha

Born in Quebec City in 1941, Monique Joachim is a professional cellist. She has taught for over 20 years at the Académie internationale du Domaine Forget and the Stage orchestral Vivaldi de Normandie, while serving as a concert commentator for some of the leading summer music festivals in France. An avid writer, she has had a number of literary successes over the years. Monique Joachim divides her time between teaching young people, writing, and the many trips she enjoys taking, her tour of French abbeys six years ago being among her favourites.

Second Prize - French
Jacques Côté - Le chemin de croix de lowell

Born in Lévis in 1959, Jacques Côté teaches at Cégep de Sainte-Foy. He is known for his detective fiction, particularly Le rouge idéal (Alire, 2002), for which he received the Arthur Ellis Award for the best Canadian crime novel in 2003. The same year, he won the Grand Prix La Presse for the biography Wilfrid Derome, expert en homicides (Boréal), about the founder of North America’s first forensic medicine laboratory. In 2005, he will be publishing a new crime novel, La rive noire (Alire), as well as Le noir des glaces (400 coups), a short story for Action Week Against Racism.