Canadian writers Zarqa Nawaz, Emily Riddle among winners for 2023 High Plains Book Awards
CBC Books | Posted: October 26, 2023 4:55 PM | Last Updated: November 3, 2023
The awards recognize regional literary works about life on the High Plains in North America
Zarqa Nawaz and Emily Riddle are among the six Canadian winners of the 2023 High Plains Book Awards.
Established in 2006, the annual awards recognize regional authors and/or literary works that examine and reflect life on the High Plains in North America. The regions include the Canadian provinces Manitoba, Alberta and Saskatchewan and the American States of North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska, Colorado and Kansas.
The award program recognizes books in 13 categories, including nonfiction, fiction, poetry, children's books, photography and short stories. The award winners each received $500 and a commemorative plaque.
Nawaz won the fiction category for her book Jameela Green Ruins Everything.
In Jameela Green Ruins Everything, Nawaz tells the story of a young woman named Jameela Green whose biggest dream is to see her memoir become a bestseller. When that dream doesn't come true, she becomes involved in her local mosque, which inadvertently leads her to becoming intertwined with a plot to infiltrate an international terrorist organization. It is a dark comedy that explores success, searching for meaning and community and the failures of American foreign policy.
Nawaz is a film and TV producer, writer and former broadcaster based in Regina. She is the creator of the CBC television show Little Mosque on the Prairie. She is also the author of the memoir Laughing All the Way to the Mosque, which was shortlisted for the 2015 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour, and her novel Jameela Green Ruins Everything was longlisted in 2023 for the same award. Nawaz also wrote the 2022 CBC TV series called Zarqa which can be streamed on CBC Gem.
Listen | Zarqa Nawaz on Jameela Green Ruins Everything:
Riddle won the poetry award for her debut collection The Big Melt.
The Big Melt is part memoir, part research project and draws on Riddle's experience working in Indigenous governance and her affection for confessional poetry in crafting feminist works that are firmly rooted in place. It is ingrained in nêhiyaw thought and urban millennial life events. It examines what it means to repair kinship, contend with fraught history, go home and contemplate prairie and utopia in the era of late capitalism and climate change.
Riddle is a nêhiyaw writer who is a member of the Alexander First Nation (Kipohtakaw) in Treaty Six Territory. She is the senior advisor of Indigenous relations at the Edmonton Public Library and has been published in various publications such as The Washington Post, The Globe and Mail, Teen Vogue, The Malahat Review and Room Magazine. She won the first-ever Griffin Poetry Prize Canadian First Book Prize for The Big Melt in 2022, and her CBC Poetry Prize entry, Learning to Count, that's featured in The Big Melt, made the 2020 CBC Poetry Prize shortlist.
Valley of the Birdtail: An Indian Reserve, a White Town, and the Road to Reconciliation by Douglas Sanderson (Amo Binashii) and Andrew Stobo Sniderman won the Indigenous Writer category.
In Valley of the Birdtail, Sanderson (Binashii) and Sniderman tell the true story about two communities — Rossburn Town and the Waywayseecappo Indian reserve — who live side-by-side but are divided by racism and inequality and how this separation came to be.
It follows multiple generations of one white family and one Indigenous family, which reflects the larger story of Canada and the issues in relations between Indigenous people and non-Indigenous people in Canada. The book concludes with hope for a better future.
Sanderson (Binashii) is Swampy Cree, Beaver clan, of the Opaskwayak Cree Nation. He is an associate professor and The Prichard Wilson Chair in Law & Public Policy in the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto. He served as senior advisor to the Government of Ontario — to the minister of Indigenous affairs and the attorney general.
Sniderman is a Montreal-based writer, lawyer and Rhodes Scholar. He has been published in the New York Times, Maclean's and the Globe and Mail. He has also worked for a judge in South Africa's Constitutional Court and provided human rights policy advising to the Canadian minister of foreign affairs.
Listen | Andrew Stobo Sniderman and Douglas Sanderson on Valley of the Birdtail:
Saskatchewan writer David Carpenter won the Creative Nonfiction category for his memoir I Never Met a Rattlesnake I Didn't Like. The book tells of Carpenter's adventures and wildlife encounters working in Jasper National Park as a young man. The essays bring animals and humans together in philosophical musings that contemplate the relationship we have with the wild.
Carpenter is the author of more than a dozen books, including nonfiction, several novels, short story collections, a collection of novellas and one volume of poetry. He co-wrote the 2017 memoir The Education of Augie Merasty, with Joseph Auguste Merasty, which told the story of Merasty's time in residential school.
Brady Harrison, hailing from Hope, B.C., won the Short Stories award for his collection The Term Between. The book features stories that explore the bonds that bend and break as characters navigate the complexities of the world.
Harrison is a writer, reporter and research officer who now lives in Montana.
The Young Adult Book winner is Behind the Label: Gloria and Willa by Lorna Schultz Nicholson, which follows Gloria and Willa, two teens who are partnered in a school club, who are both are preceded by labels — Gloria has Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) and Willa has a learning disability. As they become closer, they lean on each other and develop a strong and powerful friendship.
Lorna Shultz Nicholson is an Edmonton writer and author of children's picture books, middle-grade fiction, YA and nonfiction books. Her nonfiction children's book Amazing Hockey Stories: Hayley Wickenheiser was a finalist for the 2020 Yellow Cedar Award.
The complete list of winners is as follows:
Art and Photography
- Montana Modernists: Shifting Perceptions of Western Art by Michele Corriel
Children Middle Grade:
- Thunderous by M.L. Smoker and Natalie Peeterse
Children Picture Book
- I Do Not Like the Rotten Egg Smell in Yellowstone National Park by Penelope Kaye
Creative Nonfiction
Fiction
First Book:
- Crazy Mountain by Elise Atchison
Indigenous Writer
Nonfiction
- This America of Ours: Bernard and Avis DeVoto and the Forgotten Fight to Save the Wild by Nate Schweber
Poetry
Short Stories
- The Term Between by Brady Harrison
Woman Writer
- White Horse by Erika T. Wurth
Young Adult Book
With files from Catherine Zhu.