Alcuin Society Award Winners 2016

Winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for Children's Illustrated Book

A New York Times Best Illustrated Children's Book of the Year

In this wordless picture book, a little girl collects wildflowers while her distracted father pays her little attention. Each flower becomes a gift, and whether the gift is noticed or ignored, both giver and recipient are transformed by their encounter.

“Written” by award-winning poet JonArno Lawson and brought to life by illustrator Sydney Smith, Sidew …

Widely recognized and admired in countercultural communities but overlooked by the mainstream for decades, Anna Banana has been fearlessly challenging convention as Town Fool and Doktor Anna Freud, producing parodic publications, creating and exchanging artist's stamps and other original artworks and staging banana-themed events that she documents for a network of like-minded artists around the world. It is this vibrant community of creative individuals that has both fuelled her work and embrace …

In Keeping Watch at the End of the World, Harry Thurston explores the ways in which poetry stands sentinel at the edge-places where known and unknown meet. Whether that frontier lies between land and sea, present and past, health and illness, or youth and aging, Thurston holds that the poet’s duty is to survey the horizon and “see things before they take shape,” chronicling occurrences both acute and remote. A poet-naturalist in the tradition of Thoreau, Thurston reminds us of the importan …

Set over the course of a single day and night, Harmless is a tense, provocative, and psychologically astute first novel in the tradition of Herman Koch's The Dinner, Tom Perrotta’s Little Children, and Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap, about a weekend reunion of old friends that takes a terrifying turn when two teenage girls go missing.
 
At a remote farm, a group of old friends gather to catch up, sit by the fire, and forget about their overworked lives. But a long weekend in the country is …

A beautifully designed collection of essays on war, loss and remembrance to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the writing of Canada's most famous poem.
     In early 1915, the death of a young friend on the battlefields of Ypres inspired Canadian soldier, field surgeon and poet John McCrae to write "In Flanders Fields." Within months of the poem's December 1915 publication in the British magazine Punch it became part of the collective consciousness in North America and Europe, and its extrao …

This gorgeous 150th anniversary edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is also a revelatory work of scholarship.

     Alice's Adventures in Wonderland--published 150 years ago in 1865--is a book many of us love and feel we know well. But it turns out we have only scratched the surface. Scholar David Day has spent many years down the rabbit hole of this children's classic and has emerged with a revelatory new view of its contents. What we have here, he brilliantly and persuasively argues, is …

Second place winner of an Alcuin Soiciety Awards for Excellence in Book Design

Inspiring recipes for the olive oil and vinegar aficionado in a gorgeously photographed book—these are the absolute best ways to elevate the flavour of your fare using fresh flavoured olive oils and white and dark balsamic vinegars.

Have you recently become enamoured with fresh and flavoured extra-virgin olive oil, infused olive oil, and flavoured balsamic vinegars, only to take them home and wonder: what exactly do I …

Step right up! Step right up to the amusing amusement park! It's a whole story, and the pages have holes! Watch the holes make pictures! Turn an umbrella into a cake, and balloons into ice cream! See the holes make words. Whole words! Change an ice man into an nice man! See fork handles turn into four candles! Realize the magic with your real eyes! Frank Viva's tale of a boy spending his birthday at the amusement park will amaze readers big and small with astounding die-cuts that transform both …