Graphic novel nabs two prizes at Manitoba Book Awards

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 15/05/2020 (1976 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A graphic novel took the top prize, the McNally Robinson Book of the Year, at the 2020 Manitoba Book Awards, which were announced online on Friday morning.

This Place: 150 Years Retold, published by Highwater Press, is a collection of stories about the Indigenous experience in Canada since Confederation, and features a wide range of writers and illustrators, including Katherena Vermette, Niigaanwewidam James Sinclair, David A. Robertson and Chelsea Vowel. The book also took the Mary Scorer Award for best book by a Manitoba publisher.

The ceremony, which was to be held May 15, was cancelled because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead, winners of 13 awards in 11 categories were announced online and via social media by organizers.

Lauren Carter also won a pair of awards this year, nabbing the John Hirsch Award for most promising Manitoba writer and the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction for her second novel, This Has Nothing To Do With You, published by Freehand Books.

The top non-fiction prize went to Friends, Foes, and Furs: George Nelson’s Lake Winnipeg Journals, 1804-1822, edited by Harry W. Duckworth and published by McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Another historical piece of regional non-fiction, Jean Teillet’s The North-West Is Our Mother: The Story of Louis Riel’s People, the Métis Nation, published by HarperCollins, took home the Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award.

Other winners included Jenny Heijun Wills for Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related, published by McClelland & Stewart, which picked up the Eileen McTavish Sykes award for best first book. The memoir won the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust prize for non-fiction in late 2019.

Catherine Hunter’s St. Boniface Elegies, published by Signature Editions, won the Lansdowne Prize for Poetry; the book was a finalist for a 2019 Governor General’s Literary Award.

For a complete list of winners see manitobabookawards.com.