2009 Finalists

ALAN CUMYN
Dear Sylvia

In often unintentionally hilarious letters, young Owen Skye writes to his absent love, Sylvia Tull. Owen is a true writer in his head — but struggles to get the right words onto the page, to make sense of the upheavals around him, and to somehow reveal to Sylvia the truth of his own heart.

Amongst many honours, Alan Cumyn’s fiction for adults has twice won the Ottawa Book Award and been nominated for the Giller Prize. Dear Sylvia completes Cumyn’s popular Owen Skye trilogy of children’s novels, which between them have won or been shortlisted for twelve national awards. Cumyn teaches at Vermont College of Fine Arts and is first vice chair of The Writers Union of Canada.

COLIN MORTON
The Local Cluster

Colin Morton's The Local Cluster breathes Canadian air and landscape. It reminds us that "nature" does not require wilderness but envelopes us even in urban areas. This collection of free verse poems, prose poems and haibun—a form combining prose poetry with brief, elegant lines of verse—reminds us of the Oriental masters and is a major contribution to contemporary poetry.

Award-winning Canadian writer Colin Morton has published a novel and eight books of poetry. He has performed his work on film and CD, collaborating with jazz and new music performers and artists. A teacher and freelance editor, he lives in Ottawa, Ontario.

DAVID O’MEARA
Noble Gas, Penny Black

Lucid accurate detail and music at every turn; many of the poems in Noble Gas, Penny Black explore the subject of departure and arrival, an ongoing theme in David O'Meara's work. Travel—being between places, in stations and airports and unfamiliar cities—creates a psychological, emotional space rife with reassessment, where the individual dwells simultaneously in the future and in the past.

Born and raised in Pembroke, Ontario, David O'Meara now lives in Ottawa and tends bar at the Manx Pub. Storm still (1999) was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award. The Vicinity (2003) was shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and the Ottawa Book Award, and won the Lampman Award. Noble Gas, Penny Black is his third collection.

SCOTT RANDALL
Character Actor

The 12 stories that make up Character Actor celebrate the uncelebrated, commonplace men and women who find themselves in unfortunate crises and awkward predicaments. With cleverness and genuine empathy, these carefully structured and richly detailed narratives create portraits of lives that are at once recognizable and surprising.

Scott Randall has published two short story collections—Last Chance to Renew and Character Actor—and has recently completed a novel entitled Unruly Little Animals. He lives in Ottawa with his wife and daughter.

ANDREW STEINMETZ
Eva’s Threepenny Theatre

Andrew Steinmetz is the author of a memoir, Wardlife: The Apprenticeship of a Young Writer as a Hospital Clerk and two collections of poetry, Histories and Hurt Thyself. Steinmetz's work has been shortlisted for the Edna Staebler Award, the Quebec Writers Federation (QWF) First Book Award, the Mavis Gallant Prize for non-fiction, and the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry. Steinmetz is the editor of Esplanade Books, the fiction imprint at Véhicule Press.

TIM COOK
Shock Troops: Canadians Fighting the Great War 1917-1918

Highly acclaimed and comprehensive, Shock Troops follows the Canadian forces during the titanic battles of Vimy Ridge, Passchendaele, and the Hundred Days campaign. Through the eyes of foot soldiers who fought and died in the trenches on the Western Front, and based on newly uncovered Canadian, British, and German archival sources, this book builds on Volume 1 of Tim Cook’s national bestseller, At the Sharp End.

Tim Cook is the Great War historian at the Canadian War Museum, as well as adjunct professor at Carleton University. His books have won numerous awards, including both the Ottawa Book Award for non-fiction and the J. W. Dafoe Book Prize for At the Sharp End, and most recently the 2009 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction for Shock Troops.

D. PETER MACLEOD

Northern Armageddon: The Battle of the Plains of Abraham

D. Peter MacLeod is the pre-Confederation historian at the Canadian War Museum, where he curated the permanent exhibits on the Seven Years' War and the Battle of the Plains of Abraham. He is the author of The Canadian Iroquois and the Seven Years' War. He lives in Ottawa, Ontario.

A.B. MCKILLOP
Pierre Berton: A Biography

Brian McKillop is author of The Spinster and the Prophet, which was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for Non-Fiction and the Charles Taylor Prize, and which won the Arthur Ellis Award for Best True Crime, the U.B.C. President's Medal for Biography, and the Toronto Book Award. He is chair of the department of history at Carleton University.

MICHAEL PETROU
Renegades: Canadians in the Spanish Civil War

Michael Petrou interviewed veterans, visited the battlefields, and scoured recently declassified archival material to write the definitive account of Canadians in the Spanish Civil War. Renegades offers a detailed and fascinating account of who these men and women were, why they volunteered, and how they lived and died in Spain.

Michael Petrou is a foreign correspondent at Maclean's magazine. He has covered wars and conflicts across Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. He holds a doctorate in modern history from the University of Oxford.

KERRY PITHER
Dark Days: The Story of Four Canadians Tortured in the
Name of Fighting Terror

Dark Days recounts how a Canadian national security investigation went terribly wrong, culminating in the overseas detention and torture of four Canadian Muslim men. It chronicles the activities of the investigation itself, and the experiences of those it targeted—Ahmad El Maati, Abdullah Almalki, Maher Arar and Muayyed Nureddin. Two inquiries have since effectively cleared their names, and corroborate Pither’s account of Canadian complicity in their brutal torture.

A passionate human rights advocate, Ottawa’s Kerry Pither has worked on a wide range of national and international issues over the last 20 years. She played a pivotal role in the campaign for Maher Arar’s release from Syrian detention, and in the campaign for answers about Canadian complicity in torture abroad.