The five authors on the short list are Lisa Robertson, Zak Jones, Téa Mutonji, Blair Palmer Yoxall and Ashraf Zaghal.TGAM Visuals/Supplied
Cult-favourite author, poet and essayist Lisa Robertson is one of five shortlisted nominees for Canada’s Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. The other finalists are all first-time novelists.
Ms. Robertson’s Riverwork, published by Coach House Books, is also one of 14 books longlisted for this year’s Giller Prize. The protagonist in the Paris-set novel is a domestic who inherits her great-aunt’s journal entries, written a century earlier.
“I’m often motivated by topics and details that seem to be left out of the official narratives,” the Toronto-born, France-based writer told The Globe and Mail recently. “One of those absences has been the labour of women, particularly working-class women. They are barely present in the big books of history and literature, although they hold up the world. I’m interested in what women keep, what we take, what we do in secret, what we pass on, and how we do that.”
Ms. Robertson once ran Proprioception Books, a Vancouver store that specialized in poetry, theory and criticism. Her first novel, The Baudelaire Fractal, was a finalist for the Governor-General’s Award for English-language fiction in 2020.
The Atwood Gibson jury cited Riverwork as a “stunning foray into a river of language” and an “insightful meditation on the nature of being.”
The jury, consisting of writers Conor Kerr of Edmonton, Kathleen Winter of Quebec’s Eastern Townships and past winner David Chariandy of Toronto, considered 118 titles representing 62 publishing imprints. The prize purse totals $100,000, with the winner receiving $70,000 and the other finalists getting $7,500 each.
The distinguished literary award was founded in 1997 as the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. It was renamed in 2021 to honour Canadian literary couple Margaret Atwood and Graeme Gibson (who died in 2019).
Five books shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction
This year’s shortlisted authors include Zak Jones for Fancy Gap, published by Hamish Hamilton Canada. One of the characters in the story, about three estranged generations in Appalachia, is a soldier dishonourably discharged from the military. The Toronto-based author is a U.S. Army veteran and dual Canadian-American citizen who won the Writers’ Trust of Canada’s Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers in 2023.
The jury called Fancy Gap an “exceptional, uncanny read” that brings Appalachia alive and entails beauty, despair, longing and a search for community.
Toronto-based Congo-Canadian poet and fiction writer Téa Mutonji was shortlisted for My Person, published by Random House Canada. Her debut collection of short stories, Shut Up You’re Pretty, was a finalist for the Atwood Gibson prize in 2019.
The jury praised My Person as a “witty, moving and fiercely authentic” portrait of millennial life and the complex realities of interracial relationships.
Blair Palmer Yoxall, a member of the Métis Nation of Alberta, was nominated for Treat Them as Buffalo, published by Harper Avenue. The anti-Western, about resilient Métis women and missing teenaged Indigenous boys in the late 19th century, was described by the jury as a story that “moves with high energy and suspense in an ambitious way.”
The fifth finalist is Toronto’s Ashraf Zaghal, a Palestinian-Canadian poet and novelist born and raised in Jerusalem. His Seven Heavens Away, published by House of Anansi Press, follows a Palestinian teenager who comes of age amid escalating violence in Jerusalem.
“The writing exhibits a miracle of tenderness in a harsh and perilous surround, treasuring the protagonist’s young internal voice within its larger, older cultural context of tension, loyalty and violence,” the jury said.
Among the previous Atwood Gibson winners are Austin Clarke, Helen Humphreys, Alice Munro, Joseph Boyden, Lawrence Hill, Miriam Toews, Emma Donoghue, André Alexis and last year’s prize-taker Maria Reva, for her novel Endling.
This year’s winner will be revealed at the Writers’ Trust Awards in Toronto on Nov. 10.