'Audience of Chairs' grabs Newfoundland award

Novelist Joan Clark has won one of eastern Canada's most prestigious literary awards.

Clark’s latest novel, An Audience of Chairs, captured the 2006 Winterset Award for excellence in Newfoundland writing.

It’s Clark’s second time in the winner’s circle.  She won three years ago for a children’s book, The Word from Home.

After accepting the award on Thursday, Clark said she was "speechless and overcome and deeply grateful." The award was presented at Government House in St. John's by Newfoundland Lieutenant Governor Ed Roberts.

"I am so honoured to have received this award again," she said in an interview with CBC Radio. "And I’d like to say that it makes me very proud, too, that you can write a children’s book and an adult book and they can both stand up to an award of this magnitude."

An Audience of Chairs follows the sad but funny struggle of Moranna MacKenzie, a woman who lives alone in a Cape Breton farmhouse, as she battles mental illness while grieving the loss of her two daughters, taken from her a long time ago.

Also shortlisted for the award were Roberta Buchanan and Anne Hart, co-authors of The Woman Who Mapped Labrador, and Enos Watts for Spaces Between the Trees.

Journalist and author Richard Gwyn created the $5,000 prize to commemorate his late wife Sandra Fraser Gwyn, a social historian and prize-winning author who was born in St. John’s.  Sandra Gwyn died in 2000.

Winterset was the name of the house on Winter Avenue in St. John's where Sandra Gwyn lived until the age of 11 when her parents left the province.  Built in the 1800s, it was one of the oldest homes in the city.

The annual prize is given to published literary works, written either by a native of Newfoundland and Labrador or by a writer who has lived in the province for at least one year.

All genres – fiction, non-fiction, poetry or published drama – are considered.