Cree author and lawyer Michelle Good.Kent Wong / The Canadian Press
Cree author and lawyer Michelle Good continues to rack up nominations as a nominee for the first novel award.
Amazon Canada and the Walrus announced the top six novelists on Tuesday for the prize of $ 60,000.
Good, who is from the Red Pheasant Cree Nation in Saskatchewan, is shortlisted for Five little Indians, from HarperCollins Publishers.
The book, which follows a group of residential school survivors trying to forge new lives in Vancouver, was a Writers’ Trust finalist and is now up for the Governor General’s Fiction Award.
Francesca Ekwuyasi of Halifax is also gaining momentum on the awards circuit with Pork bread with butter and honey, from Arsenal Pulp Press.
The intergenerational story of three Nigerian women is also a finalist in the Governor General’s Fiction and shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize.
Jael Richardson of Brampton, Ont., Executive Director of the Festival of Literary Diversity, is nominated for his dystopian tale Gutter child, from HarperCollins Publishers.
Toronto’s Marlowe Granados also scored a nod for her summer game in New York, Happy Hour, from Flying Books.
John Elizabeth Stintzi, raised in Bergland, Ont., Who won the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers in 2019, is shortlisted for “Vanishing Monuments,” by Arsenal Pulp Press, about a non-binary photographer who reconnects with their mother who has dementia.
Sheung-King of Toronto to complete the shortlist You eat an orange. You are naked., from Book * hug Press, about a young translator traveling the world with his anonymous lover.
The winner will be announced in a virtual ceremony on May 27.
The grand prize is worth $ 60,000, while each shortlisted author receives $ 6,000.
Created in 1976, the previous winners of the First Novel Award are Michael Ondaatje, WP Kinsella, Nino Ricci, David Bezmozgis, Andre Alexis and Madeleine Thien.
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