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LEARNMOREATTHEGLOBEINSIDERS.CAA18 | NEWS O THEGLOBEANDMAIL| WEDNESDAY,NOVEMBER6,
R
awi Hage is no stranger to
literary awards season, but
this year’s Writers’ Trust
Awards ceremony was different.
He already knew he was a win-
ner – Hage won the $25,000 En-
gel Findley Award for a writer in
mid-career. The annual event,
held at the Glenn Gould Studio
in Toronto and hosted this year
by author Catherine Hernandez,
is a big night for Canada’s writ-
ers, with seven literary awards
and more than $260,000 pre-
sented.
Reached by phone ahead of
the ceremony, Hage joked: “You
feel like you are a middle-aged
man now, winning an award for
mid-career. The good news is
that you still have a way to go
until the end.”
Young-adult novelist Susin
Nielsen was named the winner
of the $25,000 Vicky Metcalf
Award for Literature for Young
People. Now the author of six
novels, Nielsen had a successful
career writing for television
shows, includingDegrassi Junior
Highbefore a slow spell in her
40s inspired her to realize her
dream of publishing a novel. “I
just had this epiphany one
morning,” she said by phone.
“You’re a writer, you idiot, this is
your opportunity.” She sat down
and wrote her debut,Word Nerd.
The night’s biggest cash prize
went to Jenny Heijun Wills, who
took home the $60,000 Hilary
Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for
Non-fiction for her debut,Older
Sister. Not Necessarily Related: A
Memoir(McClelland & Stewart).
Born in Korea, Wills was adopted
by a white Canadian family as aninfant. She recounts her journey
to find her biological family and
asks difficult, essential questions
about adoption across cultures.André Alexis was named win-
ner of the $50,000 Rogers Writ-
ers’ Trust Fiction Prize for his
take on the quest narrative,Days
By Moonlight (Coach House
Books), part of the “quincunx”
of thematically linked novels
that includesFifteen Dogs, whichwon both this prize and the Sco-
tiabank Giller Prize in 2015.
Angélique Lalonde won the
$10,000 Writers’ Trust/McClel-
land & Stewart Journey Prize for
her short storyPooka, about an
artist who finds an outlet for his
family’s history in the stories he
weaves into his carpets. La-
londe’s story appears inThe Jour-
ney Prize, an anthology of the
stories that made up the long list
for this prize.
Awarded to a mid-career poet,
the $25,000 Latner Writers’ Trust
Poetry Prize was presented to
Stephen Collis, whose six collec-
tions of poetry were praised by
the jury as “an invigorating body
of work that convincingly ad-
dresses both the urgency of the
present moment and the long
echoes of our historical and lyr-
ical past.” Collis’s collections in-
cludeOn the MaterialandTo the
Barricades.
Finally, the $25,000 Matt Co-
hen Award, presented in recog-nition of a lifetime of distin-
guished work by a Canadian
writer, was awarded to Olive Se-
nior. Reached by phone ahead of
the ceremony, Senior described
the closeness between her life
and work: “I don’t separate my-
self as a writer from the life that I
live because it’s really what de-
fines me, being a writer,” she
says. “It always has.” The author
of more than 15 works of fiction,
non-fiction, poetry and chil-
dren’s literature, Senior says she
cautions aspiring writers that it
will be difficult to make a living
from their craft (a 2018 report
from the Writers’ Union of Cana-
da found that writers’ incomes
had dropped 78 per cent in the
previous 20 years, placing many
below the poverty line). But she
has no regrets. “Writing has giv-
en me a good life in so many
ways,” she says. “It’s given me
the world.”Special to The Globe and MailCanadianauthorscashinatWriters’TrustAwards
Morethan$260,
inprizespresented
tosevenawardwinners
BECKYTOYNE The night’s biggest
cash prize went to
Jenny Heijun Wills, who
took home the $60,
Hilary Weston Writers’
Trust Prize for
Non-fiction for her
debut, Older Sister.
Not Necessarily Related:
A Memoir.