Lisa Alward and Fawn Parker among winners of the 2024 New Brunswick Book Awards
CBC Books | Posted: June 4, 2024 6:29 PM | Last Updated: July 17
The awards celebrate the province's best poetry, fiction, nonfiction and children's picture books
Lisa Alward and Fawn Parker are among the winners of the 2024 New Brunswick Book Awards.
The annual awards, presented by the Writers' Federation of New Brunswick, celebrate the province's best fiction, nonfiction, poetry and children's picture books.
Alward won the Mrs. Dunster's Award for Fiction for her short story collection Cocktail. Cocktail explores some of life's watershed moments and the tiny horrors of domestic life. Beginning in the 1960s and moving forward through the decades, Cocktail tells intimate and immersive stories about the power of desire — and the cost of pursuing it.
Cocktail was longlisted for the Carol Shields Prize and shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award.
Alward's short fiction has appeared in The Journey Prize Stories 2017, Best Canadian Stories 2017 and Best Canadian Stories 2016. She is the winner of the New Quarterly's 2016 Peter Hinchcliffe Short Fiction Award as well as the 2015 Fiddlehead Short Fiction Prize. She lives in Fredericton. She was on the 2018 CBC Short Story Prize longlist for Orlando 1974 which is included in Cocktail.
LISTEN | Lisa Alward on her short story collection Cocktail and her N.B. Book Award nomination:
Parker won the Fiddlehead Poetry Book Prize for her debut collection Soft Inheritance. Soft Inheritance resonates with feelings of grief and memory after Parker's mother received her cancer diagnosis. Her poems are written in honour of the places and faces she loves most.
Parker is an author and currently a PhD student at the University of New Brunswick. Her novel What We Both Know was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2022. Soft Inheritance is her first poetry collection.
LISTEN | How Fawn Parker writes about grief:
Sara O'Leary won the Alice Kitts Memorial Award for Excellence in Picture Book Writing for The Little Books of the Little Brontës. The book was illustrated by Briony May Smith.
Anne Koval won the Writers' Federation of New Brunswick Nonfiction Award for Mary Pratt: A Love Affair with Vision.
The 2024 judges were Donna Morrissey for fiction, Bertrand Bickersteth for poetry, Madhur Anand for nonfiction and Deborah Kerbel for children's writing.