The winner of the 2022 VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres Award is Remnants by Céline Huyghebaert and translator Aleshia Jensen from Book*hug Press!
Congratulations! We thank our judge Susan Olding for her good reading, all the authors who are pushing limits of genre, and the presses publishing these excellent books! Vancouver Manuscript Intensive founded this award to support authors and publishers in creating and marketing exceptional hybrid works of literature. The innovation and quality of the submissions was truly inspiring.
We are delighted to announce the shortlist of three titles, as well as three honourable mentions, for the second annual VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres Award. This annual award is given to an exceptional title of Canadian literature that celebrates the hybrid and unclassifiable through innovation in genre. The winner will be announced at a ceremony at Vancouver Writers Fest on Saturday, October 22, 2022, 5pm PST and presented $500 by judge Susan Olding with special guest of honour Betsy Warland in attendance. The two finalists will also be recognized.
The finalists in alphabetical order are:
My Mother, My Translator by Jaspreet Singh (Véhicule Press)
Remnants by Céline Huyghebaert, translated by Aleshia Jensen (Book*hug Press)
Whitemud Walking by Matthew James Weigel (Coach House Books)
Susan Olding writes of these finalists:
Memoir, auto-fiction, documentary, dream—Céline Huyghebaert’s Le drap blanc, ably translated in English as Remnants by Aleshia Jensen (Book*hug Press), is all these and more—an original, probing, and deeply moving attempt to come to terms with the death of a parent and a family fractured by poverty, alcohol, and loss. Through overlapping and sometimes contradictory accounts, an image of the father emerges for writer and reader alike—one that can never be fixed and absolute but must always remain mutable, blurred, and incomplete.
Jaspreet Singh’s family history is marked by trauma, and therefore, also, by silence—for “trauma resists translation.” In My Mother, My Translator (Véhicule Press), he re-examines his parents’ and grandparents’ stories of partition, his own memories of anti-Sikh violence in the 1980s, and his move to Canada and decision to become a writer in a series of braided, looped, collaged, and imagistic vignettes that accrete and accumulate, diffuse and recombine. An unforgettable quest for an irretrievable past.
In Whitemud Walking, Matthew James Weigel (Coach House Books) unsettles the archive, deconstructs the myth of treaty, and restores the history of his family through a series of mournful, visionary, and sometimes darkly funny interventions using text, image, sound, silence, and the kinetic energy that arises from his perfectly calibrated juxtapositions, rearrangements and inventions. A powerful and moving book.
Please join us to celebrate the finalists and winner at an in-person event at Vancouver Writers Fest on Saturday, October 22, 2022 at the Blending Genres panel moderated by Elee Kraljii Gardiner. At the end of this event, VMI director Rachel Rose will introduce the award and invite Susan Olding to announce the winner.
The judge would like to extend special recognition to three titles as honourable mentions:
David Bradford’s Dream of No One But Myself (Brick Books) is a beautiful mash-up of a book—a “survivor-survivor” memoir about a troubled mixed-race family from Montreal in which shards, footnotes, erasures, ripped and reconstructed family photos, and the play of sound and silence combine to conjure the essence of a complex and irresolvable past.
Tanis MacDonald’s Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female (Wolsak and Wynn) is a warm, witty, and perceptive investigation into what makes walking “a vehicle for presence.” Personal, poetic, and proudly feminist, Straggle shows us that walking is more than a means of locomotion; it can also move us towards genuine self-scrutiny, decolonization, and a deeper commitment to our planet.
What is grief? How do we live with it? Those are the questions at the heart of Stuart Ross’s The Book of Grief and Hamburgers (ECW Press). With humour, courage, and a gift for surprising connections, Ross faces down a devastating series of losses in an elliptical, poetic, and sometimes hilarious essay whose silences manifest its subject and whose scenes revive his beloved ghosts.
About the judge:
Susan Olding is the author of Big Reader: Essays, and Pathologies: A Life in Essays, selected by 49th Shelf and Amazon.ca as one of 100 Canadian books to read in a lifetime. Her essays, fiction, and poetry have appeared widely in literary journals and magazines throughout Canada and the U.S., including Arc, The Bellingham Review, Grain, Prairie Fire, Maisonneuve, The Malahat Review, and the Utne Reader, and have won a National Magazine Award, the Edna Staebler Prize for the Personal Essay, and other honours. She lives with her family in the traditional territories of the Lekwungen and W̱SÁNEĆ nations, in Victoria, British Columbia.
For further information please contact WarlandAward@gmail.com