AWARD ANNOUNCEMENTS | Griffin Poetry Prize, Giuseppe Acerbi Award, CAA Winners and Parents Choice Award Honourees
We're pleased to announce that it's finally starting to feel like summer in Canada, and a number of our favourite books from spring have won awards!
PI IN THE SKY (9780316089166 | HBG) by Wendy Mass and THE CATS OF TANGLEWOOD FOREST (9780316053570 | HBG) by Charles de Lint have been honoured in the Spring 2013 Parent's Choice Awards.
PI IN THE SKY received The Parents' Choice Recommended Seal. This award implies their approval and their recommendation for reasons of production, appeal and fulfillment of its clear intent. THE CATS OF TANGLEWOOD FOREST received The Parents' Choice Approved Seal, which indicates a wholesome product that helps children enjoy developing physical, emotional, social or academic skills. For more information, visit the Parents' Choice website.
ECW Press author, Christopher Meades, won the 2013 CAA Fiction Award for THE LAST HICCUP (9781550229738 | ECW PRESS), which was hailed by Library Journal as a "wickedly funny story," and Bard Howard won the CAA Exporting Alberta Award for WESTERN TAXIDERMY (9781927063118 | NeWest Press). Herizons Magazine wrote, "Not only would I recommend reading [WESTERN TAXIDERMY], I would recommend re-reading it not long after." The awards are presented by the Canadian Authors Association and were announced on June 15th.
WHAT'S THE SCORE? (9781894469623 
| Mansfield Press) by Toronto Author David McFadden won the Griffin Poetry Prize!
“‘If the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise,’ advised William Blake in his Proverbs of Hell. As if whispering through the ages into the ear of Canada’s deadpan court jester, Blake’s radical spirit slyly presides over David McFadden’s exuberant thirty-fifth publication, What’s The Score? With their arch yet affable tone, these ninety-nine irreverent and mock-earnest poems lay siege to the feelings of boredom, anxiety, and alienation that afflict a culture obsessed with wealth and prestige, leading us, again and again, down the road of excess to the palace of wisdom. ‘My poems go leaping from crag to crag,’ McFadden boasts in one poem, before quickly, and characteristically, scuttling this Romantic image of the egotistical sublime ‘like a stubble-faced crybaby, it’s probably / because I’ve been writing for so long, / forty years of poems to various friends.’ The easy, casual intimacy of these poems will befriend you on the first page. Their astonishing leaps and their genuine philosophical urgency will compel you to keep reading. ‘Stick around,’ invites this artful and knowing wise fool, ‘everyone should have a chorus / following his steps and reminding him / of his central role in some great dream.’” – Suzanne Buffam
Read more at: http://www.griffinpoetryprize.com/awards-and-poets/shortlists/2013-shortlist/david-mcfadden/#sthash.QzcFLEtC.dpuf.
And finally, Leonidas Donskis won the Essay Writing Prize for the Giuseppe Acerbi Award for A SMALL MAP OF EXPERIENCE: REFLECTIONS & APHORISMS (9781550716603 | Guernica Editions). Robert Ginsberg, Director of The International Center for the Arts, Humanities, and Value Inquiry, wrote, "This is a powerful original contribution to the philosophy of culture. Donskis shows that modernity is perforce always troubled, for we are confronted with competing cultural and political traditions from which we have emerged, while we are obliged to face divergent directions for our next steps. The result of Donskis's bold exploration is an impressive travelogue of the human spirit in which the reader takes an active part. This is truly what must be called an engaging book."
Congratulations to all of the winners!