2015 Governor General's Literary Awards Shortlists

How You Were Born is a collection of short stories looking at the bizarre, the tragi-comic and the unbelievable elements that run through our lives. 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 pu …

For Your Safety Please Hold On is a truly remarkable first poetry collection from debut talent Kayla Czaga. Her poems are already making waves--several from this collection have received award attention, including: The Fiddlehead's 23rd annual Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize, The Malahat Review's 2012 Far Horizon's Award for Poetry and an Editor's Choice Award in ARC Poetry Magazine's 2012 Poem of the Year Contest. They have also been shortlisted for The New Quarterly's 2013 Occasional Verse Contes …

Iris Trimble is trying to hold it all together. She may very well fly off the face of the earth if she doesn’t hang on to the kitchen counter. At least that’s how she feels after her mother, Bernice, a lively, recently widowed fifty-five-year-old breaks the news that she has early onset Alzheimer’s. In an effort to cope with the stress, Iris makes her mother’s famous Everything-That-Is-Bad-For-You casserole, a childhood favourite. Her siblings, on the other hand, are on opposite sides of …

A rich and imaginative discovery of how ink has shaped culture and why it is here to stay

Ink is so much a part of daily life that we take it for granted, yet its invention was as significant as the wheel. Ink not only recorded culture, it bought political power, divided peoples, and led to murderous rivalries. Ancient letters on a page were revered as divine light, and precious ink recipes were held secret for centuries. And, when it first hit markets not so long ago, the excitement over the …

Audrey is a cow with poetry in her blood, who yearns for the greener pastures beyond Bittersweet Farms. But when Roy the horse tells this bovine dreamer that she is headed for Abbot's War, the slaughter house, Audrey knows that she must leave her home and friends sooner than she ever imagined. With the help of a whole crew of animals and humans alike, Audrey attempts to escape the farm she lives on--and certain death. Cleverly written as an oral account, this unique illustrated tale of an animal …

Award-winning storyteller Andy Jones and illustrator Darka Erdelji are back, with Jack, the King of Ashes Ð another riotously funny Jack tale. This time Jack spends all his time hove off in the coal box. Then one day he shakes off those ashes and sets out on an adventure that includes sneaky robbers, a "famous missing princess with reward attached", an always-surprising canine sidekick, a royal wedding, a lovelorn rooster-puppet, a conniving ship's captain, corpses, curses, kisses, coats and a …

Outline is a novel in ten conversations. Spare and lucid, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing during an oppressively hot summer in Athens. She leads her students in storytelling exercises. She meets other visiting writers for dinner. She goes swimming with an elderly Greek bachelor. The people she encounters speak, volubly, about themselves: their fantasies, anxieties, pet theories, regrets and longings. And through these disclosures, a portrait of the narrator is drawn b …

Winner of the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize
A stunning debut book of poems from a bold new voice unafraid to engage with the exigencies of our contemporary world.
    In Liz Howard’s wild, scintillating debut, the mechanisms we use to make sense of our worlds – even our direct intimate experiences of it – come under constant scrutiny and a pressure that feels like love. What Howard can accomplish with language strikes us as electric, a kind of alchemy of perception and catastrophe, fidelity …