Ottawa Book Award Finalists - it must be Fall!

The news about the Ottawa Book Award contenders is a harbinger of Fall in the Capital - not to mention an incentive to get reading!

This year's shortlisted titles in the English nonfiction category include The Taste of Longing: Ethel Mulvany and her Starving Prisoners of War Cookbook by Suzanne Evans - a little known story of a creative and energetic woman who survived the extreme depravations of wartime imprisonment in Malaysia; One Good Reason: a Memoir of Addiction and Recovery, Music and Love from Séan McCann with Andrea Aragon - as well as Dr. Brodie Ramin's The Age of Fentanyl: Ending the Opiod Epidemic.  Tim Cook makes an appearance with his latest The Fight for History about how we remember Canada's Second World War, and  last but not least, Anita Lahey's moving memoir The Last Goldfish about a friendship.  The English fiction nominees bring us the suspenceful (and locally situated) Dark August by Katie Tallo, and Nina Berkhout's Why Birds Sing; poetry by Conyer Clayton in We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite, and Michael F. Stewart's teen drama Heart Sister about the results of the gift of a transplant.  Gilles Latour, one of Ottawa's Poet Laureates, is up for the Prix du livre for Débris du sillage, as is Monia Mazigh's wonderful Farida and Daniel Castillo Durante's nouvelles in Tango.  

The Archibald Lampman Award for Poetry and the AAOF Prix littéraire émergence authors are also shortlisted.

Borrow the titles from OPL (all listed below). Read and judge for yourself!  Support local writers in your reading choices and look for the winners to be announced at the virtual Ottawa Book Awards ceremony on October 20 at 6 PM.