Canadians John Vaillant and Christina Sharpe among finalists for U.S. National Book Awards
CBC Books | Posted: October 4, 2023 1:47 PM | Last Updated: October 4, 2023
Canadian writers John Vaillant and Christina Sharpe are among the finalists for the 2023 U.S. National Book Awards.
The annual awards recognize the best books published in the United States. There are five categories: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translated literature and young people's literature.
Both Vaillant and Sharpe are nominated in the nonfiction category.
Valliant is nominated for Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast, which delves into the events surrounding the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire, the multi-billion-dollar disaster that melted vehicles, turned entire neighbourhoods into firebombs and drove 88,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon.
"Like millions of people around the world, I watched in horror and amazement as the entire city disappeared beneath a pyrocumulus cloud 14 kilometres high. For several days, the possibility that the entire city could be lost was real. It was clear to me then that this was a historic event with serious implications — not just for Alberta, or for Canada, but globally," Vaillant said in an email to CBC Books earlier this year.
Vaillant is a Vancouver-based freelance writer, novelist and nonfiction author. His first book, The Golden Spruce, won the 2005 Governor General's Literary Award for nonfiction. Vaillant's second title The Tiger, was a national bestseller and was a contender on Canada Reads in 2012.
LISTEN | John Vaillant discusses the season of wildfire:
Sharpe is a finalist for her form-defying book, Ordinary Notes, which explores the everyday complexities of Black life and loss through a series of 248 notes which intertwines past and present realities.
Sharpe is a Toronto-based writer, professor and Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University. Her previous book, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, was named one of the best books of 2016 by The Guardian, and a nonfiction finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award.
"I think that the word 'note' gives us the kind of sonic, textual, haptic things about memory. Things about encounter, about attending to and listening to. It was a logic through which I could think about Black life," Sharpe said in an interview on The Next Chapter. "I felt like 'note' spoke to memory, it spoke to a kind of experience that could bind people together and provide some other sense of being in the world."
LISTEN | Christina Sharpe discusses
Both titles are also shortlisted for the $75,000 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction.
The other finalists in the nonfiction category are Ned Blackhawk for The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History, Cristina Rivera Garza for Liliana's Invincible Summer: A Sister's Search for Justice and Raja Shehadeh for We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I: A Palestinian Memoir.
Paul Harding's Maine-based historical novel This Other Eden, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah's dystopian Chain-Gang All-Stars and Justin Torres' multi-generational Blackouts are among the fiction finalists, alongside Aaliyah Bilal's debut story collection Temple Folk and Hanna Pylväinen's The End of Drum-Time.
The winners will be announced at a dinner ceremony in Manhattan on Nov. 15, when poet Rita Dove and longtime City Lights bookseller Paul Yamazaki will receive honorary prizes, and Oprah Winfrey will be a featured speaker.
Publishers submitted a total of 1,931 books for the five competitive categories, which are judged by panels of writers, booksellers and other members of the literary community.
With files from the Associated Press