Aboriginal author, book dominate Saskatchewan Book Awards
- EFN Staff | April 29, 2014
Books by and about Aboriginal people swept the 2014 Saskatchewan Book Awards, with Métis author Lisa Bird-Wilson taking home three awards, and a scholarly work by James Daschuk receiving four awards.
Several hundred people, including government and sponsor representatives, as well as appreciative readers, joined Saskatchewan's literary luminaries at the Conexus Arts Centre in Regina on Saturday, April 26 for the 21st Awards Ceremony, featuring guest speaker Warren Cariou.
Bird-Wilson, from Saskatoon, was presented with the coveted University of Regina Book of the Year Award. Her book, Just Pretending, published by Coteau Books of Regina, also won the SaskPower Fiction Award and the Rasmussen, Rasmussen & Charowsky Aboriginal Peoples' Writing Award. In addition, Coteau Books also took home the First Nations University of Canada Aboriginal Peoples' Publishing Award for the book.
The Award jurors called Just Pretending an "important contribution to the Canadian literary canon" and "sharply observed...sparkling stories by a gifted new voice in Canadian literature."
The book's recurring themes include the complexities of identity, belonging/not belonging, Aboriginal adoption, loss and abandonment, regret and insecurity: a deadbeat dad tries to reconnect with his daughter after 22 years away. A selfish poet has been scarred by an upbringing that leaves him emotionally distant from his children and spouse. A pot-smoking middle-aged man undertakes a modest quest for meaning following a brush with mortality. A fourteen-year-old girl struggles to come to terms with her feelings of abandonment.
Asked about her motivation for writing Just Pretending, Lisa said that several years ago she read some pieces written by adult learners for the creative writing unit of a high-school equivalency course. The stories were about the experience of being Aboriginal and adopted, and their effect on her planted the seed of wanting to explore this identity and to affect readers in the same deep way.
Regina's James Daschuk took home four awards for Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life, published by the University of Regina Press. The book was awarded the University of Saskatchewan College of Arts & Science and Library Non-Fiction Award, the Drs. Morris & Jacqui Shumiatcher Regina Book Award, the National Bank Financial Wealth Management First Book Award and the University of Regina Arts and Luther College Award for Scholarly Writing. University of Regina Press also received the University of Regina Faculty of Education and Campion College Award for Publishing in Education for the book.
Rounding out the Awards were Paul Wilson's The Invisible Library (Saskatchewan Arts Board Poetry Award); Dianne Young's Dear Flyary (SaskEnergy Children's Literature Award); Adam Pottle's Mantis Dreams: The Journal of Dr. Dexter Ripley (City of Saskatoon and Library Saskatoon Book Award); and Fists Upon A Star: A Memoir of Love, Theatre and Escape from McCarthyism by Florence Bean James with Jean Freeman won the Ministry of Parks, Culture and Sport Publishing Award.