Kate Cayley Wins 2015 Trillium Book Award

On Wednesday, Kate Cayley won the Trillium Book Award for her first collection of short stories HOW YOU WERE BORN (9781897141656) published by Pedlar Press.  Her short story collection explores the strange, tragi-comic and surreal moments of everyday life. Here's the book synopsis: 

An aging academic becomes convinced that he is haunted by his double. Two children believe their neighbours are war criminals in hiding. A dwarf in a circus dreams of a perfect wedding. An eleven-year-old girl becomes obsessed with the acrobat who visits her small town. Two women fall in love over a painting of the apocalypse. A group of siblings put their senile Holocaust survivor father into institutional care, while failing to notice that he is reliving the past. Each story examines, from a different angle, the difficult business of love, loyalty and memory. With elegance and restraint, in spare language, these narratives run the gamut from realistic to uncanny, from ordinary epiphanies to extremities of experience. Settings range from present-day Toronto, to small town Ontario in 1914, to West Virginia in 1967, characters ranging from the very young to the very old, the manifestly unhinged to the ostensibly sane. These are dark stories in which light finds a foothold, and in which connections, frequently missed or mislaid, offer redemption.

Kate's collection beat out Margaret Atwood, Dionne Brand and Thomas King for the $20,000 prize. Congratulations to all nominees!

For more information on the Trillium Book Award, one of the province's leading awards for literature, visit http://www.omdc.on.ca/book/trillium_book_award.htm.