My novel Prodigies (Five Star/Cengage) has been shortlisted for two prizes in the 2022 Manitoba Book Awards.
The Winnipeg International Writers’ Festival, which co-ordinates the awards, announced May 6 that Prodigies was one of five books on the shortlist for the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction. Prodigies is also on the shortlist for the Michael van Rooy Award for Genre Fiction, awarded every second year, which was created about a decade ago to recognize works in crime writing, speculative fiction and other genres that tend to be overlooked in favour of literary fiction. An interesting note is that two books from the genre fiction shortlist are also on the fiction shortlist: Prodigies and Catherine Macdonald’s crime novel So Many Windings.
I guess while I’m at it, I can take about one-tenth of a bow for the fact that the speculative fiction anthology Alternate Plains is also on the shortlist for the Michael van Rooy Award. The collection of horror, science fiction and fantasy from the prairie provinces features my alternate-realities literary-world comedy Frank 2.0.
The winning books will be announced June 9.