Richard Gwyn wins Charles Taylor Prize

From the Quill and Quire :

Richard Gwyn wins Charles Taylor Prize

A book with a distinctly Canadian focus has captured this year’s Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction. John A.: The Man Who Made Us: The Life and Times of John A. Macdonald (Random House Canada), the first biography of Canada’s founding prime minister to appear in more than 50 years, took home the $25,000 purse on Monday.Click here for the full story in the Quill and Quire.

Audio Publishers Association Communications Committee members and special guest Janet Russell of Rattling Books do first Member Call in a series

Learn best publicity practices in the audio industry!

The Communications Committee will be holding the first Member Call of the year on Friday, February 22 at 12:00 – 12:45 pm EST.

Log in to the Members' section of the APA website for details on how to RSVP.

The first in a series of educational calls planned for 2008, APA Communications Committee members will be on hand to discuss ways to promote your titles, narrators and authors through effective public relations strategies.

Some topics for discussion may include:

• Working with reviewers and other members of the media to get the best coverage for your titles

• Managing publicity campaigns with limited staff resources• How social media can enhance your publicity efforts

• And much more!

Join Communications Committee members Theresa Pantazopolous from Simon & Schuster Audio, Liz Noland from Macmillan Audio and Katherine Tiernan from HarperAudio, with special guest Janet Russell of Rattling Books in Newfoundland. All will be available for questions during this call.

Come prepared with your questions!

If you are not a member, but would like to join our call, click here and sign up for APA membership now!

Stories to Sing to: Exploring Newfoundland Song with Anita Best and company

CANADA LIVE! presents
THE NEWFOUNDLAND SONGBOOK VOL 1 & 2

Featuring an all-star cast of traditional music makers including: Anita Best, Pamela Morgan, Kelly Russell, Billy Sutton, George Morgan and Graham Wells.

VOLUME 1 - The Early Days
Friday, November 2
LSPU Hall

Lords and ladies, pirates and sailors, villains and cruel parents, the Newfoundland Songbook has it all.
In part one of the two part concert series Pamela Morgan, Anita Best and an all-star cast of Newfoundland’s traditional music makers explore the songs of our ancestors.
The show presents material from the British, French, Irish and Scottish cultures that formed the foundation of the Newfoundland oral tradition since the earliest days. These classic and broadside ballads, ditties and tunes comprise the heart of the cannon that is the Newfoundland Songbook.
Love, betrayal, murder, revenge, trickery - the themes are universal; the scene historic; with a narrative that ties the songs into world events and local history of the era.

VOLUME 2 - 1850-1949
Saturday, November 3
LSPU Hall

Songs and tunes that were made up about life in the new world, in the New-founde-lande.
They tell of disasters at sea, sly politicians, soup suppers in the parish hall, life under the "cruel rogues of merchants", work in the lumber woods or on the boats. They speak of a world of community values and virtues, of hard work and simple fun. They give us a picture of a young country making its way in a new world.
Some of them make sport of local characters and the small world of scattered coastal communities. Names are named and real people come to life in historical events.
The selections for this show include songs from Johnny Burke, Mark Walker and Peter Leonard and tunes by fiddlers Emile Benoit and Rufus Guinchard.
For more details click here.

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Anita Best and George Morgan have both performed on Rattling Books recordings.

Anita Best narrated two of the stories in Susan Rendell's collection In the Chambers of the Sea as well as narrating Merrybegot by Mary Dalton. Together with Robert Joy and Rick Boland Anita is also heard on Coasting Trade by Robin McGrath.

George Morgan played pump organ and Fisher-Price Roly Poly on In the Old Country of My Heart by Agnes Walsh.

Short Fiction Singles now available from rattlingbooks.com

New Option from rattlingbooks.com

Short fiction Singles as Digital Downloads only

LisaMoore MavisGallant JanisSpence JoelThomasHynes SusanRendell

with new titles coming soon.

Yesterday's Globe on House of Anansi's 40th Birthday

'The big guys keep being surprised by us'

The House of Anansi began in a rented basement, but 40 years on, it's ready to hit the big leagues, James Adams writes
JAMES ADAMS
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
October 20, 2007 at 9:40 AM EDT

(In the photo: House of Anansi President Sarah MacLachlan, chairman Scott Griffin and publisher Lynn Henry. (Tibor Kolley/The Globe and Mail))

TORONTO — The house that first housed the House of Anansi is still standing near the University of Toronto on Spadina Avenue, its facade with the impressive Beaux Arts and Second Empire flourishes now squished between Daddyo's Pasta & Salads and the Wing Ho Funeral Home.

There's a heritage plaque by the front door, but it doesn't identify 671 Spadina and its dank basement as the rented quarters where, in the fall of 1967, two nationalistic university English graduates in their late 20s named Dennis Lee and Dave Godfrey started what would become one of the three most influential presses in the literary history of Canada, along with McClelland & Stewart and Coach House Press.

Hundreds of books later by the likes of Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje, the press that Jack McClelland predicted would last no more than 18 months still lives on Spadina Avenue. But it won't be celebrating its 40th birthday in a basement. Anansi's home is now a light-filled eighth-floor aerie of blond hardwood and high ceilings far to the south of its original digs.

The environment says it all about the brightened outlook at Anansi. One British publisher recently called it "the red-hot centre of literary publishing in Canada." Owned since 2002 by Toronto businessman and poetry enthusiast Scott Griffin, the company last year reported sales of just under $5-million and now employs a full-time staff of 20. It wasn't so long ago, when Anansi was still part of the now-defunct Stoddart empire, that there were three staffers and annual sales hovered around $400,000.

Earlier this year, the Canadian Booksellers Association (CBA) named Anansi its publisher of the year after its 2006 triumphs, which included: an Anansi title, Peter Behrens's debut novel The Law of Dreams, winning the 2006 Governor-General's Literary Award for English fiction (with Rawi Hage's De Niro's Game also short-listed) and two books on the 2006 Scotiabank Giller Prize short list (De Niro's Game and Gaétan Soucy's The Immaculate Conception). Meanwhile, the company's publisher since 2005, Lynn Henry, took the CBA's "editor-of-the-year" honours.

This week, Lee, now 68, learned his most recent volume of Anansi-published poetry, Yesno: Poems, was on the short list for the 2007 Governor-General's poetry prize.

To read the rest of this article click here.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY ANANSI!

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Rattling Books would like to thank Anansi for taking us under their wing (Rattling Books are distributed in Canada through House of Anansi Press). We wish them health, wealth and happiness for atleast forty more!

Newfoundland swallow Pamela Morgan honoured by Memorial University

"For her contribution to the development of traditional music" in Newfoundland and Labrador, singer/songwriter and former lead singer with the much loved Figgy Duff band, Pamela Morgan was recently awarded (October 12, 2007) an honorary doctor of letters by Memorial University of Newfoundland.

There are few Newfoundlanders who listen to music who have not been haunted by the voice of Pamela Morgan. Figgy Duff was Canada's Fairport Convention. Pamela Morgan our Sandy Denny. I remember being in grade eleven and moving to town and hearing Figgy Duff do Jim Jones the Fisher who Died in his Bed and life was never the same again.

Check it out. They recorded it.

Walsh's Bachelors now available as Digital Download from rattlingbooks.com

Going Around with Bachelors

by Agnes Walsh

A BRICK BOOKS PUBLICATION

Now Available as a Digital Download from rattlingbooks.com

Narrated by the author with unaccompanied ballads sung by Simone Savard-Walsh. In this recording the author reads a selection of poems from her recent book of poems published by Brick Books (2007). The poems are interspersed with the unaccompanied ballad singing of Walsh's daughter Simone Savard-Walsh. This Digital Download is made available through Rattling Books courtesy of Brick Books and the author.

The spirit of the departed - source, origin, heritage, history - is the essence of this book, rich with the tang of Newfoundland speech. Agnes Walsh's first collection of poems, In the Old Country of My Heart, is one of the best loved poetry works to come out of Newfoundland. Going Around with Bachelors continues and extends Walsh's distinctive subject matter: the past in the present, Ireland and Portugal in Newfoundland, weather internal and external, the Cape Shore. Here are poems of place and of people in place, of family both immediate and extended. They are also absolutely contemporary poems by a poet, gifted with a remarkably flexible and distinctive voice, who is planted, in her own words, "straight up and down into what's new."

The Laying Out, 1956

Wash the corpse, put on the habit,

put the pennies on the eyelids,

the prayer book under the jaw,

fold the arms with the rosary beads

entwined around the fingers,

stop the clock, turn the looking glass

to the wall, knock him on the forehead

with the hammer to make sure he's dead.

Reviews

"...Walsh's poetry is like nothing else you will read: 'clean as a shriek,' declarative, funny in all the unexpected places, full of unadorned wisdom and bone-naked sadness. There is no word for what you will find here - the closest we have is truth."

- Lisa Moore

"As Walsh explores her home and its past, or travels to Ireland or Portugal, she adheres to a phrase from Mary Oliver that she quotes at the beginning of one poem: 'the usual is news enough.' In these poems Walsh's usual becomes a thing of great and enduring beauty."

- Bill Robertson, The StarPhoenix

"...Me and Ye is pure, oral and aural delight."

- George Elliott Clarke, The Chronicle Herald

"Hearing Walsh’s work performed is a mesmerizing experience, for the rhythms of the poems themselves, the power of their narratives, and for the experience of listening to Walsh’s rich reading voice."

- Mark Callanan, The Independent

Michael Winter's Facebook Odyssey

Michael Winter plans novel teaser on Facebook
CBC Arts
June 22, 2007

Canadian author Michael Winter, who wrote The Big Why, will release excerpts of his next novel through a series of posts on the Internet site Facebook.

Beginning next Tuesday, he plans to offer 300-word distillations of each chapter of the novel The Architects are Here.

Publisher Penguin Canada announced the plan as the world's first Facebook novel serialization.

Winter plans 47 posts over the next 10 weeks, including commentary, notes, and visuals to accompany the novel.

The novel features the character Gabriel English, who figures in Winter's earlier novels This All Happened and One Last Good Look.

In The Architects Are Here, English takes a road trip from Toronto to Corner Brook, NL.

The book is to be released in September. Winter, who was born in Britain but grew up in Newfoundland, now divides his time between Toronto and St. John's.

Click here to read another article on Michael Winter's Facebook odyssey

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Coming soon from Rattling Books: an unabridged audio edition of The Big Why, Michael Winter's dazzling reinvention of the historical novel—a passionate and witty faux memoir of Rockwell Kent, the famous illustrator of Moby Dick.

Mary Dalton's Red Ledger on short list for Atlantic Book Awards Poetry Prize

The following is the citation for Mary Dalton on the Atlantic Books Festival website:

Mary Dalton
Red Ledger
Véhicule Press, 2006.
ISBN 1-55065-216-8

Collection number four from Mary Dalton packs tight the tough and visceral with the erotic and the sociopolitical. Writing in The Globe and Mail, author Jane Urquhart, who chose the book among her best of 2006, notes, “It's sensuous, surprisingly lively at times, and sometimes very wonderfully dark; the emotions revealed in these poems taste like atmosphere. Salt, for example, is a recurring metaphor for desire and for the dizzying parade of images that make up the much-loved places ("St. John's as well as "round the bay") where the poet lives.”

Mary Dalton lives in St. John’s and teaches in the English Department at Memorial University. Her outstanding contribution to the arts has been recognized with the Newfoundland & Labrador Arts and Letters Award. Mary’s previous book, Merrybegot, won the 2005 E.J. Pratt Poetry Award and was shortlisted for the Winterset and Pat Lowther Memorial Awards.

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Mary Dalton is also the author of Merrybegot. The unabridged audio edition of Merrybegot , narrated by Anita Best with trumpet by Patrick Boyle is available from rattlingbooks.com.

Chronicle Herald article: Jones’s Uncle Val fills audience with joy of storytelling, laughter

(from the Halifax Chronicle Herald, Saturday May 5, 2007)

Andy Jones is so brilliant and heartwarming, you wish you could hold his words in your fingers like a string of worry beads.

The St. John’s, N.L., comic actor and writer kicked off the 14th annual On the Waterfront Theatre Festival to a standing ovation Friday night.

"Geez, he’s something else," one audience member said as he was leaving the packed Alderney Landing Theatre in Dartmouth.

Jones’s show is a wonderful comic meditation on Newfoundland, daily life and everyone’s fear of mortality.

An Evening with Uncle Val, derived from a popular character Jones first created in 1978, interweaves a beloved, aged, outport exile grumbling about life with his grandkids in suburban St. John’s with Andy the actor telling the story of himself as a young townie falling in love with the old rural Newfoundland storytellers.

He and a raft of others sought to study Newfoundland culture, reshape it and share their passion for it with fellow Newfoundlanders and with Canada. An Evening with Uncle Val does exactly that.

At the heart of the show is the beloved character of the widower Uncle Val writing to his friend Jack about his daughter Margaret, his odious son-in-law Bernard, his rhyming grandchildren Kimmy and Jimmy and the poodles, Tiffy and Tuffy.

Val is upset by the newfangled ways in St. John’s and by cable TV, which introduces American soap operas and unhappy Americans into the living room.

"I know why they’re always unhappy," he tells Jack.
"Their liquor cabinets are always full. They got nothing to strive for."

On a set of piled-up boxes, a doll’s house representing Margaret’s home, a desk and a kitchen table for Val’s favourite tea, Jones roams around as both Uncle Val and himself in complete control of the audience, yet seemingly offhand as he addresses the audience directly and ad libs beautifully.

The audience is enveloped in the joy of storytelling, of comedy and of being part of theatre about theatre and about human nature.

Highlights include poodle slippers that move of their own accord when a caped Uncle Val fantasizes he is the household king about to witness the drunken Bernard’s undoing, and Andy the actor’s voice-perfect imitations of Joey Smallwood and J.F.K., who accompany him on the road.

Do yourself a favour and go see An Evening with Uncle Val, which runs roughly 90 minutes and is on tonight at 9:30 p.m. and Sunday at 7 p.m. at the Alderney Landing Theatre. For tickets, call Ticket Pro at 1-888-311-9090 or go online to www.ticketpro.ca.

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Letters from Uncle Val, the audio CD, written and performed by Andy Jones is available from rattlingbooks.com

Robin McGrath teaching course in North American Aboriginal Literature in Happy Valley - Goose Bay

Starting May 14 for five weeks, Robin McGrath will teach English: 2160 North American Aboriginal Literature, an introduction to aboriginal literature in a social, political and historical context. Beginning with the oral tradition, it will cover poetry, drama, short stories and novels by North American aboriginal writers.
This is the first time this English course has been offered.

The course will be taught at College of the North Atlantic in Happy Valley-Goose Bay. For information contact Martha MacDonald at 896-6213, or at macdonald.m@nf.aibn.com.

Robin McGrath is most recently the author of Coasting Trade: a Performance for three voices with soundscapes. Coasting Trade is the product of a collaboration between author Robin McGrath, radio producer Chris Brookes and actors Robert Joy, Rick Boland and Anita Best.

A Poem a Day at Words at Large website

For a poem a day fix you can visit Words at Large, a CBC website about Canadian Letters. Today it's a poem by Dionne Brand.
Yesterday it was a poem by Don McKay.
The day before that it was Michael Crummey.
The day before that Roo Borson.
The day before that Michael Ondaatje.
The day before that.
The day before.
The day.

No Delusions: By Clare-Marie Gosse (St. John's) The Independent, April 20, 2007 - article on Joel Thomas Hynes

No delusions
By Clare-Marie Gosse (St. John's)

The Independent

Friday, April 20, 2007

Something that’s been troubling Joel Thomas Hynes for a while is the thought of complacency. Of getting to a point where everything seems to be ticking along so well, no worries, that he doesn’t really feel the need to try hard anymore.

After all, Hynes is a successful, award-winning writer with a brand new novel, Right Away Monday, set to hit stores May 5th; his first book, Down to the Dirt, which met with international acclaim, is about to be made into a movie (shooting with Newfound Films begins in June); and as an acclaimed actor, he’s currently preparing for the opening of his own one-man show, Say Nothing Saw Wood, at the LSPU Hall, May 7th.

It would be easy to understand how he might feel like settling back and relaxing over life’s general concerns — comfortable the work will just roll in, that he’ll always be a great parent, that he no longer needs to work on sobriety.

“I really think that f—king everything passes you by as soon as you get that attitude into your head,” Hynes remarks. Or worse, instead of passing you by, life smacks you a curve ball while you’re looking the other way.

One such incident helped inspire Say Nothing Saw Wood. The play, which started out as a short novel, is about anti-hero Jude Traynor, a sentenced murderer, “working himself out in front of an audience” as he reflects on a split-second decision he made a decade before in his late teens. The decision culminated in the death of an elderly woman and changed Traynor’s life forever.

The play, or “dramatized recitation,” is a story Hynes says he always intended to write. It’s loosely based on a sensational murder that took place in his hometown of Calvert on the Southern Shore in the 1970s, but it’s also the result of a serious wake-up call he himself experienced at the age of 17.

A self-confessed “hard ticket … largely considered to be a nuisance,” Hynes says he was strolling down a lane after a night of drinking, when for no particular reason, he picked up a fist-sized rock and hurled it into the air.

“While it was still in the air, out around the side of this shack — and this was about seven o’clock in the morning — there was a man walked out that I couldn’t see when I threw it because of the bend in the road. Suddenly he was there, and he had two little girls, hand in hand, and I threw this rock and I just saw it going right for the girl on the outside, and she must have been two or three … everything just stopped; that was my life right there.”

The rock just missed the girl, but the incident hit Hynes hard.“

I’ve just been quite fascinated by how close you can come sometimes to really just ending everything by chance and I sort of worked that concept into this story.”

Say Nothing Saw Wood has already won a Best Dramatic Script Award from the 2005 Newfoundland and Labrador Arts and Letters competition, which bodes well for a production Hynes describes as a return to oral story-telling theatre with no “bells and whistles.

....

Say Nothing Saw Wood runs at the LSPU Hall May 7-13.

Click here to read the rest of this article

To read an excerpt from Say Nothing Saw Wood on this Blog click here.

HearYe Hear Ye: Monday nights at da Spur in St. John's will forthwith be forthwrite at the mic

For anyone in St. John's Newfoundland on a Monday Night take note:

Monday nights, commencing April 23rd., will be poetry/prose open mic night at The Spur (just down from the Ship). There will be no featured writers but all are welcome. Reading order will be according to the luck of the draw. It begins at 8:00 PM.

New release from Canada's Poet Laureate: Rattling Books announces launch of audio edition of John Steffler's The Grey Islands

Tors Cove, Newfoundland and Labrador - April 19, 2007- Rattling Books releases unabridged audio edition of The Grey Islands, by Canada's Parliamentary Poet Laureate John Steffler.

Narrated by John Steffler, Frank Holden, Janis Spence, Deidre Gillard-Rowlings and Darryl Hopkins, this audio edition of Steffler's classic The Grey Islands is the first new title from Canada's Poet laureate since his appointment in December, 2006.

Launch Event
John Steffler will celebrate the launch of The Grey Islands and read from his work April 24, 2007, at the Tree Reading Series. The event will take place at the Royal Oak II, 161 Laurier East (near King Edward), Ottawa, Ontario.

Tree Readings are every second and fourth Tuesday of the month at the Royal Oak II Pub at 161 Laurier Avenue East in Sandy Hill. Open-set commences at 8:00 p.m., with featured reader to follow. Admission is free. For more information, please contact Dean Steadman at 613-749-3773 or mail to: dean.steadman@treereadingseries.ca.

John Steffler

John Steffler was born in Toronto and grew up in a rural area near Thornhill, Ontario. He studied at the University of Toronto and the University of Guelph. He lived in Newfoundland from 1975 where he taught in the English Department at Sir Wilfred Grenfell College in Corner Brook until his recent retirement.

His books of poems include Helix: New and Selected Poems (Signal Editions, 2003), That Night We Were Ravenous (M&S, 1998), The Wreckage of Play (M&S, 1988), The Grey Islands (M&S, 1985; Brick, 2000), and An Explanation of Yellow (Borealis Press, 1981). He is also the author of a novel, The Afterlife of George Cartwright (M&S, 1992; Henry Holt, 1993), and an illustrated children's book, Flights of Magic (Press Porcepic, 1987).

In addition to winning the 1992 Smithbooks/Books in Canada First Novel Award and the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award, his novel, The Afterlife of George Cartwright, was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for Fiction and the Commonwealth First Novel Award. That Night We Were Ravenous won the Newfoundland and Labrador Poetry Prize and the Atlantic Poetry Prize in 1999. Helix: New and Selected Poems won the Newfoundland and Labrador Poetry Prize in 2003.

In December 2006, John Steffler became Canada's third Parliamentary Poet Laureate, a two year post.


The Grey Islands

A novel in the form of poems, a physical exploration of Newfoundland's past, a search for ghosts in an abandoned settlement on an abandoned island, this is the story of a come-from-away determined to immerse himself in the physical reality of Newfoundland in an abrupt and inescapable way.

A modern classic of Canadian poetry, The Grey Islands is one man's meditation on the interplay between nature and human society in the rugged setting of coastal Newfoundland. The boats and houses of those who tried to live on the Grey Islands have disappeared, but their stories survive in the neighboring settlements - stories of treks on the sea ice, of near-starvation, of hunting ducks at night with muskets loaded with everything from nails to the parts of a gold pocket watch.

This is a book of such excellence that someone in future is liable to say about the author: "Steffler - Steffler? - oh yes, he wrote The Grey Islands, didn't he?"
- Al Purdy, Books in Canada

The Grey Islands is a piece of genius, a psychological drama in poetry and prose...
- Andrew Brooks, Canadian Literature

The Grey Islands is, I suspect, one of the finest long poems written in the last 10 years.
- Mark Abley, Montreal Gazette


Listen to a clip from The Grey Islands.

The Grey Islandsby
John Steffler
unabridged audio edition, Rattling Books 2007
Originally published in print form by McClelland and Steart (1985); Brick Books (2000)

Narrated (in order of appearance) by John Steffler, Frank Holden, Janis Spence, Deidre Gillard-Rowlings and Darryl Hopkins
Island soundscapes recorded off the coast of Newfoundland
Directed, recorded and mixed by Janet Russell

Listening Time: roughly 2 1/2 hours10-digit ISBN: 0-9737586-0-013-digit ISBN: 978-0-9737586-0-3
Audio CDs (2) $24.95
Digital Download $14.95

Rattling Books

Rattling Books is a not just SMALL, but fine Canadian audio press, publishing poetry, fiction, and historical outdoor adventure non-fiction from a perch over looking the Northwest Atlantic.

For background, news and excerpts, visit our blog. You can also visit us on MySpace

Rattling Books are distributed in Canada through House of Anansi Press by HarperCollins. Our titles are available in the US from Ingram Books and Overdrive. Additional distribution information is available on our website.

Anyone interested in obtaining a review copy or interviewing the Author please contact the Publisher :

Rattling Books
Janet Russell
Email: info@rattlingbooks.com
Phone: (709) 334-3911

Don McKay shortlisted for Griffin Poetry Prize once again

The following excerpt is from an online CBC article.
Read the whole article here.

Canadian Don McKay shortlisted for Griffin Poetry Prize
Tuesday, April 3, 2007 1:29 PM ET
CBC Arts

Canadian poetry veteran Don McKay and Frederick Seidel, one of the founding editors of iconic literary magazine The Paris Review, are among the seven shortlisted poets vying for the 2007 Griffin Poetry Prize.

Canadian poet Don McKay received his third nomination for the Griffin Poetry Prize on Tuesday. McKay, a two-time Governor General's Literary Award winner, logged his third Griffin nomination at the shortlist announcement in Toronto Tuesday for one of the world's most lucrative poetry honours.

"Don McKay is up for the third time because he is a really, truly great poet. I would be surprised if he wasn't [nominated] regularly," prize founder Scott Griffin told CBC Arts Online moments after he and trustee David Young unveiled the 2007 finalists.

"The fact that some of the names are coming up and recurring for the second or third time, that gets people familiar with these poets and, hopefully at some point, they say, 'Well maybe I should try and read some of these guys and see what it's all about.'"

Read the rest of this article here.


Don McKay has a title forthcoming from Rattling Books this spring. Songs for the Songs of Birds is a selection of poems on the theme of birds, birding and flight selected and read by Don McKay.

Brick Books Author Jan Conn touring Atlantic Canada

Jan Conn - author of Jaguar Rain Jan Conn’s new book Jaguar Rain: the Margaret Mee Poems (Brick Books 2006) is written in the voice of Margaret Mee (naturalist, explorer, and painter of flowers in the Amazon between 1956 and 1988). Jan Conn has published five previous books of poetry, most recently Beauties on Mad River: Selected and New Poems (2000). She is a Research Scientist at the Wadsworth Center, New York State Department of Health, in Albany, NY, and Associate Professor in the Biomedical Sciences Department at the School of Public Heath at SUNY-Albany. Her current research is focused on the populations of malarial mosquitoes in the Brazilian Amazon. Fredericton - Monday, March 19 - University of New Brunswick, 8 p.m. reading with Ken Babstock in the Alumni Memorial Lounge. Halifax - Tuesday, March 20 - at 8:30ish, at the Shoestring Reading Series at the Seahorse Tavern on Argyle Street (just next to the Shoe Shop). For more information, call David Rimmington at 902-488-9643. Antigonish - Wednesday, March 21 - Evening reading at St. Francis-Xavier University. More details to follow. St. John’s, Newfoundland - Friday, March 23 - evening reading at 113 Bond Street.

Icelandic Writers Union site notice regarding Rattling Books

Rattling Books Author Agnes Walsh and Narrator Anita Best recently performed in Iceland. Rattling Books ran a Translation Contest for Icelanders to translate a poem by Walsh into Icelandic. We will post the winning translation separately in a future blog. Here is a page about this story on the Iceland Writer's Union website. Of course we have no idea what it is saying. Do you?


Úrslit kynnt í þýðingarsamkeppni Rattling Books frá Nýfundnalandi:
Þýðing Aðalsteins
þótti öðrum betri


Aðalsteini Ingólfssyni voru á laugardaginn afhent verðlaun í þýðingarsamkeppni Rattling Books frá Nýfundnalandi. Þýðing hans á ljóði Agnesar Walsh, The Day I Married Halldor Laxness, þótti öðrum innsendum þýðingum betri. Rithöfundasamband Íslands annaðist framkvæmd samkeppninnar og dómari var Ingibjörg Haraldsdóttir.

Það var Agnes Walsh sjálf sem afhenti Aðalsteini sigurlaunin, iPod spilara (spilastokk), að Gljúfrasteini. Við það tækifæri las Agnes upp nokkur ljóða sinna jafnframt því sem Aðalsteinn las eigin þýðingu á ljóði skjáldsins.

Þýðingarsamkeppnin var haldin í tengslum við komu fjölmennrar viðskiptasendinefndar frá Nýfundnalandi til Íslands í síðustu viku. Á meðal gesta í sendinefndinni voru fulltrúar frá Rattling Books. Þetta er lítið útgáfufyrirtæki á Nýfundnalandi sem hefur m.a. sérhæft sig í útgáfu hljóðbóka. Agnes Walsh er kunnur höfundur á heimaslóðum og hefur frá barnæsku haft dálæti á verkum Halldórs Laxness.

Heimsókn viðskiptasendinefndarinnar var skipulögð af viðskipta- og fjárfestingadeild Innovation, Trade and Rural Development (INTRD) stofnunarinnar á Nýfundnalandi í samvinnu við Newfoundland and Labrador Organisation of Women Entrepreneurs (NLOWE). KOM almannatengsl höfðu milligöngu um útfærslu heimsóknarinnar í samvinnu við kanadíska sendiráðið á Íslandi.

Michael Crummey's "Wreckage" wins Heritage & History Award

Congratulations to Michael Crummey, whose novel The Wreckage (Doubleday Canada)
was awarded the Heritage & History Award last night.

The Historic Sites Association & The Writers’ Alliance of Newfoundland & Labrador (WANL) made the announcement at WANL's annual Chistmas Party in St. John's. The award is intended to celebrate work "that exemplifies excellence in the interpretation of the history and heritage of Newfoundland and Labrador."

Michael Crummey is also the author of Hard Light. In 2003 Rattling Books released an audio edition of Hard Light: 32 Little Stories narrated by Michael Crummey, Ron Hynes and Deidre Gillard-Rowlings.

You can give a listen to Ron Hynes reading from Hard Light by clicking here.

Writers' Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador Announces Winner of Fresh Fish Award

This weekend, the Writers’ Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador held their annual conference once again at the Masonic Temple in St. John’s. The event brings together
writers from all over the province for a weekend of literary frolicking, creative workshops, and a banquet where everyone dons costumes and celebrates another year of
spectacular literature from this easternmost region of North America.

This year added a new event to the mix: The announcement of the Fresh Fish Award for Emerging Writers. This award is generously sponsored by Newfoundland author Brian O'Dea and provides one of the most generous cash prizes in Canada for an unpublished writer. The winning author receives a cash prize of $4,000, in addition to editing services of a professional editor valued at up to $1,000 and her or his name inscribed on a brass plaque, and a miniature sculpture in the style of "Man Nailed to a Fish" by sculptor Jim Maunder. The two runners-up each receives $1,000 cash.

In his speech, Brian remarked that his bank account isn’t large by any means, but he wanted to give back to the community and encourage emerging writers in his home province, adding that anyone else who would like to follow in his footsteps is more than welcome. Here, here Brian.

Congratulations to Sara Tilley (Snowflake-Young), the winner of the inaugural Fresh Fish Award. Sarah chose to read a selection from her manuscript that was set in the Masonic Temple and I swear by the time she finished her characters were shuffling through the hallways and arguing in the coatroom.

Congratulations also to the two finalists Claire Wilkshire (Maxine) and Degan Davis (The Forgetting Room).

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