The 2009 Roger’s Trust Writers Fiction prize finalists have been announced.
These awards are such a great way to discover some of our Country’s top flight writers, both old and new.
The Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize
Sponsored by Rogers Communications Inc.
Winner: $25,000; Finalists: $2,500
Established in 1997, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize recognizes Canadian writers of exceptional talent for the year’s best novel or short-story collection
Fences in Breathing, by Nicole Brossard
Invited to a quiet Swiss château by the enigmatic Tatiana Beaujeu Lehmann, Anne begins to slowly write a novel in a language that is not hers, a language that makes meaning foreign and keeps her alert to the world and its fiery horizon. Will the strange intoxication that takes hold of her and her characters – sculptor Charles; his sister, Kim about to leave for the far north; and Laura Ravin, a lawyer obsessed with the Patriot Act – allow her to break through the darkness of the world? This novel was first published in French as La Capture du sombre in 2007.*
Generation A, by Douglas Coupland
In the near future, ecological damage has given rise to the apparent extinction of honey bees, sparking a pollination crisis. On an autumn day five unconnected people – in the US, Canada, France, New Zealand, and Sri Lanka – are all stung. Spirited away for medical testing by a shadowy pharmaceutical company their shared experience unites them in ways they could never have imagined. Generation A explores new ways of storytelling in a digital world and occupies the perplexing hinterland between optimism about the future and everyday apocalyptic paranoia.*
The Golden Mean, by Annabel Lyon
Aristotle is forced to postpone his dream of succeeding Plato as the leader of the Academy in Athens when Philip of Macedon asks him to stay on in his capital city of Pella to tutor his precocious son, Alexander. Appalled at first, he is soon drawn to the boy’s intellectual
potential. Born into a warrior culture, thrown before his time onto his father’s battlefields, Alexander needs to learn the golden mean, that elusive balance between extremes that Aristotle hopes will mitigate the boy’s will to conquer.*
Too Much Happiness, by Alice Munro
The title story in this collection follows real-life Russian mathematician Sophia Kovalevsky on her final journey from France to Sweden, the only country in the 1890s that would accept a female professor. Other stories sweep readers into a home invasion in a lonely widow’s remote house, reveal the cracks through which someone can slip into a life on Toronto’s streets, and show a small-town girl who watches three women vie for power around a dying man’s bed. With piercing insight, Munro provides honest and exacting fiction in this diverse collection.*
Eva’s Threepenny Theatre, by Andrew Steinmetz
Billed as “an unusual fiction about memoir,” Eva’s Threepenny Theatre tells the story of the author’s great-aunt, Eva Mathilde Steinmetz, who played a whore in the first workshop production of Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera in Berlin in 1928. Recording her recollections, Eva takes us back to her childhood, life in Weimar Germany, and, with the pronouncement of the family’s Jewish origins, escape from Nazi rule. In a series of fragmented stories we see the author’s own life as it intersects with Eva’s, and his changing perspective on her stories.*
*(book descriptions are from the Rogers Writers’ Trust site)
