Bertrand Bickersteth and Timothy Caulfield among winners for 2021 Alberta Literary Awards
Vicky Qiao | | Posted: June 14, 2021 4:32 PM | Last Updated: June 14, 2021
Bertrand Bickersteth and Timothy Caulfield are among the winners of the 2021 Alberta Literary Awards.
The Alberta Literary Awards, the Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize and the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize, all administered by the Writers' Guild of Alberta, annually recognize the best in literary works by Alberta authors.
Bickersteth won the $1,500 Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry for his debut poetry collection, The Response of Weeds: A Misplacement of Black Poetry on the Prairies.
Bickersteth explores what it means to be Black and Albertan through a variety of prisms: historical, biographical and geographical. The Response of Weeds offers a much-needed window on often overlooked contributions to the province's character and provides personal perspectives on the question of Black identity on the prairies.
"These formidable poems, each expressed in a powerful voice, use jazz and biography to destabilize the presumed history of a western province through its geographical features and flora," the jury said in a statement.
Bickersteth was born in Sierra Leone, raised in Alberta, and has lived in the U.K., and the U.S. He is an educator who also writes plays and poems. Bickersteth made the 2018 CBC Poetry Prize longlist for the poem Wakanda, Oklahoma. He lives in Calgary, teaches at Olds College and often writes about Black history in Western Canada.
Caulfield won the $1,500 Wilfrid Eggleston Award for Nonfiction for Relax, Dammit!: A User's Guide to the Age of Anxiety.
In Relax, Dammit!, Caulfield takes us through a regular day and shows the underlying science behind many of the small decisions we make. What he reveals is that we make decisions that are based, to a lesser or greater extent, on misinformation. Many of the things we believe to be healthier, safer, or just better, simply aren't.
"It's not an easy endeavour to make scientific research so accessible to large audiences, but Timothy Caulfield does a thorough and entertaining job of debunking health and wellness fads that add nothing to your life yet drain your wallet," said the jury in a statement.
Caulfield is a health policy expert, a professor at the University of Alberta and the host of the TV series A User's Guide to Cheating Death. He is also the author of Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything?
Tyler Enfield won the 2021 Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize for Like Rum-Drunk Angels.
The $10,000 prize is awarded to the best book of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, children's literature or drama published in the year prior.
Like Rum-Drunk Angels is a novel about Francis Blackstone, a 14-year-old gunslinger with a heart of gold. He's fallen for the mayor's daughter and resolves to make his mark to win her favour. Francis meets the volatile outlaw Bob Temple. So begins the adventures of the Blackstone Temple Gang as they crisscross the west in search of treasure, redemption, and the possibility of requited love.
Enfield is a writer and photographer from Edmonton. He is the writer of several YA books, as well as the novel Madder Carmine.
Here is the complete list of winners:
- R. Ross Annett Award for Children's Literature: The Silence Slips In by Alison Hughes
- James H. Gray Award for Short Nonfiction: The Floating Library by Tim Bowling
- Howard O'Hagan Award for Short Story: Players by Lee Kvern
- Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry: The Response of Weeds by Bertrand Bickersteth
- Jon Whyte Memorial Essay Award: Black Diamond by Barbara Scott
- Gwen Pharis Ringwood Award for Drama: Everybody Loves Robbie by Ellen Chorley
- Wilfrid Eggleston Award for Nonfiction: Relax, Dammit! by Timothy Caulfield
- Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction: Always Brave, Sometimes Kind by Katie Bickell
- Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize: Like Rum-Drunk Angels by Tyler Enfield
The City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize will be announced on Monday, June 21, alongside the full list of Calgary Awards recipients.
The finalists for the W.O. Mitchell award are The Response of Weeds by Bickersteth, The Finder by Will Ferguson and Under Shifting Stars by Alexandra Latos.
The winner will receive $5,000.
The Writers' Guild of Alberta is the largest provincial writers' organization in Canada. It was formed in 1980 to provide a meeting ground and collective voice for the writers of the province.