1998 short list:
Helen Humphreys - Winner!
author of Leaving Earth
published by HarperCollins
Book excerpt
Helen Humphreys is the author of three books of poetry, The Perils of Geography (1995), Nuns Looking Anxious, Listening to Radios (1990) and Gods and Other Mortals (1986). Her novella Ethel on Fire was published by Black Moss press in 1991. Her poetry, short stories and articles have appeared in numerous magazines, including The Malahat Review, Quarry, Event, Poetry Canada Review, The Fiddlehead Review, Grain, Arc and The New Quarterly. She has read her poetry across Canada.
Carole Corbeil
author of In the Wings
published by Stoddart
Book excerpt
Carole Corbeil is an award-winning novelist and one of Canada's foremost arts journalists. Her first novel Voice-Over won the City of Toronto Book Award in 1993 as well as the W.H. Smith First Novel Award. She has covered theatre, film and arts policy for The Globe and Mail and The Toronto Star and has written a weekly column for both papers. She has won numerous national magazine awards, including two awards for a Saturday Night Magazine piece on Jean Claude Lauzon, and has contributed to periodicals such as This Magazine and Canadian Art. She has served on the editorial board of This Magazine and Coach House Press and was also on the board of the Theatre Passe Muraille for many years. In 1998 Carole Corbeil lived in Toronto with her family.
Joanne Gerber
author of In the Misleading Absence of Light
published by Coteau Books
Book excerpt
Joanne Gerber grew up in Ontario where she studied Creative Writing at York University. She has lived in Regina since 1984. In the Misleading Absence of Light is her first book. This collection of short stories has won the Jubilee Short Fiction Award, Saskatchewan Fiction Award, Saskatchewan Best First Book Award, City of Regina Award (shared) and Third Prize in the Danuta Gleed Award for English Canadian Short Fiction. Joanne Gerber teaches creative writing in Regina and is completing her Master of Arts Degree in Religious Studies. She is currently developing a chamber opera with composer David L. McIntyre and working on her second novel.
Bruce McCall
author of Thin Ice
published by Random House
Book excerpt
Bruce McCall has worked as a commercial artist, a magazine editor and an advertising copywriter and creative director in the United States and Germany. He has contributed visual and written humour to virtually every magazine in North America. He was a prominent member of the original National Lampoon and its radio show and has also written for the television show Saturday Night Live. His humour has appeared regularly in The New Yorker since 1979 and, in recent years, he has designed many The New Yorker covers. He has served as a contributing editor of America's largest car enthusiast magazine for more than two decades and as a visual consultant on two feature motion pictures. Bruce McCall lives in New York City with his family.
Barbara Nichol
author of Dippers
published by Tundra Books
Book excerpt
Barbara Nichol is a multi-award-winning author who has also written extensively for television and radio. Her humour has appeared in Saturday Night Magazine. Her fictional documentary The Lying Down: The Story of Sarner's Disease in Upper Canada was broadcast on CBC Radio's Ideas in 1996 and 1997 and her film The Home for Blind Women won a Genie Award. She is the author of the book and the director of the Juno Award-winning platinum recording Beethoven Lives Upstairs. Nichol's Biscuits in the Cupboard (1997), an illustrated book of verse about dogs, was the winner of the Mr. Christie Book Award. Dippers was nominated for the Governor General's Award in 1998. Barbara Nichol lives in Toronto.
Barry Moser, Illustrator
Barry Moser has illustrated and/or designed over 200 titles, including the Arion Press Moby Dick and the University of California Press The Divine Comedy of Dante. In addition to being a designer, author, printer, painter, printmaker and illustrator, Moser frequently lectures and acts as visiting artist at universities and institutions across the United States. He is on the faculty of the Illustration Department at the Rhode Island School of Design. Moser's edition of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland won the American Book Award for design and illustration in 1983. Barry Moser was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee and now lives in Northhampton, Massachusetts.
Antanas Sileika
author of Buying on Time
published by The Porcupine's Quill
Book excerpt
Antanas Sileika's stories have been published in Canadian, American and European literary journals. His travel writing has been anthologized in several collections and his non-fiction has been published in diverse magazines and newspapers including Saturday Night Magazine, Reader's Digest, Cottage Life, The Globe and Mail and The Toronto Star. As a freelance broadcaster, Sileika has a regular spot on the CBC's The Arts Tonight in which he reviews books published by Canadian small presses and interviews literary biographers, such as Margaret Drabble, Michael Holroyd, Thomas Keneally and Anne Beattie. He has written both comedy and drama for CBC's Morningside, including a five-part dramatization of the life and times of a Canadian soldier of fortune, Dr. Tillson Lever Harrison. In his day job, Antanas Sileika teaches English at Toronto's Humber College.
