Saskatchewan authors shine at annual awards gala

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The 13th annual Saskatchewan Book Awards gala was held in Regina on Nov. 25, recognizing some of the best that the province's literary community has to offer.

Among those taking home awards were Sandra Birdsell, who won the Fiction Award for her historical novel Children of the Day, and the Allen Sapp Gallery, which earned the First Peoples Publishing Award for Through the Eyes of the Cree and Beyond-The Art of Allen Sapp: The Story of a People.

Maggie Siggins won the Regina Book Award for her book Bitter Embrace: White Society's Assault on the Woodland Cree. The Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan won in three categories- Scholarly Writing, Publishing and Publishing in Education.

The Book of the Year award went to Steven Ross Smith's poetry book fluttertongue 3: disarray, while the Non-fiction Award went to Sharon Butala for Lilac Moon: Dreaming of the Real West.

Eric Greenway won the First Book Award for The Darkness Beneath All Things, with Beth Goobie and her teen novel Fixed earning the Children's Literature Award. Allan Safarik won the Poetry Award for When Light Falls from the Sun and Don Kerr took home the Saskatoon Book Award for The Garden of Art: Vic Cicansky, Sculptor.

Glenda James, executive director of the book awards, commented on the number of Aboriginal authors and subjects included in the entries and shortlisted for this year's awards, as well as in the list of winners.

"The Allan Sapp book is just a beautiful book, as is the encyclopedia, which is also a beautiful book to look at with lots of representation and consultation with the Aboriginal community. And then, you know, we have Maggie Siggins' Bitter Embrace, which is about an Aboriginal community in which she spent time," James said.

"And Sandra Birdsell's is a really interesting one about some of the dynamics between the Metis people who lost their land in Manitoba and the Mennonites who often unknowingly were given that land. And so these two groups, both of them displaced people, because the Mennonites had lost their land in Russia, that's why they came to Canada. It's just a really interesting piece of history that people don't really connect."