McNally Robinson Booksellers currently has a display highlighting several Signature Editions titles. This display is part of McNally Robinson’s ongoing celebration of work from Manitoba publishers, co-presented with the Association of Manitoba Book Publishers.

The winners of the 2020 Manitoba Book Awards have been announced! Congratulations to Catherine Hunter for winning the Lansdowne Prize for Poetry. Due to COVID-19 restrictions an awards gala is impossible this year, so instead the Manitoba Book Awards is celebrating the winners via social media.

Catherine Hunter's St. Boniface Elegies has been shortlisted for the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award.

Laurelyn Whitt's Adagio for the Horizon and Catherine Hunter's St. Boniface Elegies have been shortlisted for the Lansdowne Prize for Poetry.

The finalists for the 2019 Governor General’s Literary Awards were announced Wednesday, with two Winnipeg authors making the cut. Winnipeg’s Joan Thomas has been nominated in the fiction category for “Five Wives.” Catherine Hunter, also from Winnipeg, has been nominated in the poetry category for “St. Boniface Elegies.” The Canada Council for the Arts said 70 books across seven categories have been deemed the best books published in Canada this year. About 1,400 were submitted to a peer assessment committee for consideration. “By addressing issues we care about, igniting our imaginations, choosing the right words or brilliantly transposing a story into illustrations, the 2019 Governor General’s Literary Awards finalists stoke the fire not only of our shared cultural life, but of our individual lives as well. They represent the richness, strength and excellence of Canadian literature,” said Simon Brault, director and CEO of the Canadian Council for the Arts, in a news release. According to HarperCollins, Thomas’ Five Wives is based on a true story and follows the lives of five missionary women forced to survive with their children in an Ecuador rainforest in the 1950s, after their husbands were killed. Hunter’s publisher describes her book as a four-part exploration of “a poet’s relationships with her family and her community.” The 14 winners will be announced on Oct. 29, and a ceremony to celebrate will be held on Dec. 12.

The Canada Council for the Arts revealed the 2019 finalists for the Governor General’s Literary Awards (GGLA). The list includes UWinnipeg’s Dr. Catherine Hunter’s book of poetry, St. Boniface Elegies. The GGLA are one of the oldest and most prestigious literary awards programs in Canada. Her book is one of the 70 finalists that were selected by peer-assessment committees from some 1,400 books in seven categories in both English and French. In four sections, St. Boniface Elegies traces Hunter’s relationships with her family and her community through poems about travel, love, illness, work, and the writing life. “We congratulate Dr. Hunter on being a finalist for a Governor General’s Literary Award” said Dr. Glenn Moulaison, UWinnipeg Dean of Arts. “Writers are often told to write about what they know. In the case of St. Boniface Elegies, it is obvious that Dr. Hunter has taken this to heart. Writing about what you know means writing about what you experience, love, and miss, and read, and really just knowing what good writing is supposed to look like. We are lucky she shares her talent with our students.” Hunter is a professor of English at UWinnipeg. Her earlier poetry collection Latent Heat won the McNally Robinson Manitoba Book of the Year Award, and four of the poems in St. Boniface Elegies, published earlier in CV2, won the Manitoba Magazine Award for Best Poem or Suite of Poems and earned Honorable Mention in the National Magazine Awards. Her recent novel After Light (Signature) spans for generations of an Irish-American-Canadian family in a tale of love, war, trauma, and the power of art. She has also published several mysteries with Ravenstone/Turnstone, and recorded a spoken word CD (Rush Hour, from Cyclops Press, with a bonus track by The Weakerthans). Her writing has also appeared in the journals The Malahat Review, Prism International, Essays on Canadian Writing, Matrix, West Coast Line, Prairie Fire, CV2, and Grain, and the anthologies The Echoing Years: Contemporary Poetry from Canada and Ireland; Post Prairie: An Anthology of New Poetry; Best Canadian Poems 2013; and Best Canadian Poems 2015. She edited Exposed, an anthology of five new women poets, Best the First Word: The Poetry of Lorna Crozier, and, for 10 years, she was the editor of The Muses’ Company poetry press. Since 1991, she has enjoyed teaching literature and creative writing at UWinnipeg. The winners will be revealed on October 29.