Craig Francis Power, Samuel Thomas Martin, and Russell Wangersky Shortlisted for the Big-Deal Winterset Award!

The Winterset Award celebrates excellence in Newfoundland and Labrador writing, and packs a $10,000 prize, with 2 grand each to the other finalists.

Plus it’s just an honour to win an award for the best book out of Newfoundland in a year, considering Newfoundland is the country’s literary goldmine.

I really enjoyed all three of these novels. All three writers can write a fine sentence, and their stories are daring and distinctive for different reasons.

The winner will be announced at Government House on Thursday, March 24^th.

Also worth noting, two very Newfoundlander Newfoundland writers — the Winter siblings, Michael and Kathleen, both of which having won it before — were disqualified for living away. Seems bunk, but that sort of thing is typical of most any regionally based literary award. Even when one of them owns a nice pink house here on NL soil.

Also worth noting, the Winterset award is open to all genres, and this year turned up three works of fiction.

This year’s judges were the fantastic writers, Libby Creelman, Kenneth J. Harvey, and Randall Maggs.

About the 2010 BMO Winterset Award finalists:

Samuel Thomas Martin is from Gilmour, Ontario but now calls St. John’s home. He received an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Toronto and his short stories and creative nonfiction have been published in both Canada and the U.S. When he’s not researching Norwegian death-metal or the B.C. drug trade for a new novel project, he enjoys hiking the East Coast Trail with his wife Samantha and their dog Vader.

Craig Francis Power’s debut work Blood Relatives was the winner of both the Percy Janes First Novel Award, and the Fresh Fish Award for unpublished fiction manuscripts. Craig lives in St. John’s.

Russell Wangersky’s 2008 book, Burning Down the House: Fighting Fires and Losing Myself, won three national awards for non-fiction, including the B.C. National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, the Edna Staebler Award, and the Drummer-General’s Award. His 2006 short story collection The Hour of Bad Decisions was long-listed for the Scotiabank/Giller Prize; short-listed for the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize, first book, Canada and the Caribbean; and was a finalist for the 2006 Winterset Award. Russell lives in St. John’s where he’s a journalist at The Telegram.

The three finalists will read from their works and answer questions from the audience at a public reading and reception: 7 p.m. Wednesday, March 23, at The Rooms (in the Theatre), 9 Bonaventure Avenue in St. John’s.

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