Award presentations will be made to the winners of the Ottawa Book Awards and the Lampman-Scott Prize for best book of poetry, with short readings by the winning authors. Join us for a reception following the award presentations and meet the outstanding authors who have been nominated for these prestigious prizes.

The Finalists are:

English Fiction
Mary Borsky, Cobalt Blue (Thomas Allen Publishers)
Elizabeth Hay, Late Nights on Air (McClelland and Stewart)
Frances Itani, Remembering the Bones (HarperCollins)
Joanne Proulx, Anthem of a Reluctant Prophet (Penguin Canada)
Rob Winger, Muybridge’s Horse (Nightwood Editions)

English Non Fiction
Kathy Cook, Stolen Angels (Penguin Canada)
Tim Cook, At the Sharp End: Canadians Fighting the Great War 1914-1916 (Penguin Canada)
David Goldfield, The Ambassador’s Word: Hostage Crisis in Peru 1996-1997 (Penumbra Press)
Chris Jones, Out of Orbit (House of Anansi Press)
Arthur Kroeger, Hard Passage: A Mennonite Family’s Long Journey from Russia to Canada (University of Alberta Press)

Création littéraire en français
Angèle Bassolé-Ouédraogo, Les Porteuses d’Afrique! (Les Éditions L’Interligne)
Andrée Christensen, Depuis toujours j’entendais la mer (Les Éditions David)
Jean Mohsen Fahmy, Alexandre et les trafiquants du désert (Les Éditions L’Interligne)
Maurice Henrie, Le Chuchotement des étoiles (Prise de parole)
Gilles Lacombe, La Jouissance des nuages de la pensée (Les Éditions L’Interligne)

Joan Barfoot, winner of the Marian Engel Award, returns with Exit Lines, described by the Montreal Gazette as “a tautly paced ensemble piece shot through with pathos, poignancy and insights about aging.” Canadian-born Welsh writer Tristan Hughes, winner of the Rhys Davies Short Story Award, returns with Revenant, praised by Madeleine Thien as “a beautiful novel, rich in the complexities of childhood.” Donna Morrissey, winner of the CBA Libris Award, returns with What They Wanted, exploring the wild shores of a Newfoundland outport and the equally wild environment of an Alberta oil rig.

$15 General / $10 Student or Senior / Free for Members
Day Pass: $40

Join us for the announcement of the winner; readings by the 2008 recipient of the award, honourable mentions and launch of the chapbook Lupercalia by Sean Moreland, last year’s winner. Also featuring the music of Marie-Josée Houle.

A free event.

In our first ever Writing Life devoted exclusively to short stories, we offer the stage to two acclaimed debuts and a Festival favourite. Pasha Malla’s The Withdrawal Method is described in the Globe and Mail as “devoted to the timeless narrative rewards of the fickle human heart.” Of Rebecca Rosenblum, winner of the 2007 Metcalf-Rooke Award for Once, Caroline Adderson says, “a single one of these stories offers more truth and humanity than the entire contents of most bookshelves.” With The Slow Fix, Ivan E. Coyote, winner of the 2007 ReLit Award returns to her short story roots. Find out why the Ottawa XPress says, “Coyote is to CanLit what k.d. lang is to country music: a beautifully odd fixture.”

$15 General / $10 Student or Senior / Free for Members
Day Pass: $30

Don’t miss this opportunity to meet Kenneth Oppel, hear about the writing of his latest bestseller, Starclimber, and get the answers to your questions.

Free for school groups.

French and English Canada each have rich poetic traditions. Despite the edict of national bilingualism, each tradition persists largely in isolation from the other. Pluriel, the first bilingual anthology of Canadian poetry, hopes to weaken this isolation. For the first time, English and French Canadian poetry is gathered in the same volume and presented with a translation into the other official language. Join editors Seymour Mayne, Marc Charron and Christiane Melançon at this bilingual event to celebrate the release of Pluriel and to hear poetry read by the poets and translators.

Au Canada, cohabitent de riches traditions poétiques française et anglaise. En dépit du bilinguisme national officiel, les deux traditions restent toutefois isolées l’une de l’autre. Pluriel, première anthologie bilingue de poésie canadienne, vise à rompre cet isolement. Pour la première fois, un même volume réunit en version originale ainsi qu’en traduction une sélection de poèmes canadiens en français et en anglais. Venez célébrer le lancement de Pluriel en compagnie les directeurs de l’ouvrage Seymour Mayne, Marc Charron, et Christiane Melançon et prêter l’oreille à la magnifique poésie lue par les poètes et les traducteurs.

A free event.

Time is at once intimately familiar and yet deeply mysterious. It is thoroughly intangible: We say it flows like a river — yet when we try to examine that flow, the river seems reduced to a mirage. No wonder philosophers, poets and scientists have grappled with the idea of time for centuries. The enigma of time has also captivated science journalist Dan Falk, winner of the Science in Society Journalism Award and the American Institute of Physics’ Science Writing Award, who sets off on an intellectual journey In Search of Time. Join us for an exploration of our deep desire to track time’s cycles, the mysteries of memory, the beginning and the end of time, and our latest theories about time travel — and the paradoxes it seems to entail.

$10 General / $5 Senior / Free for student groups
Day Pass: $30

Bill Gaston, winner of the Timothy Findley Prize and the ReLit Award, returns with The Order of Good Cheer, described in the Winnipeg Free Press as “a feast of nuanced writing, blessed with one of those rare endings that are absolutely perfect.” Bestselling novelist and Giller Prize winner
David Bergen returns with The Retreat, praised in the Montreal Gazette as “a powerful and engrossing novel, further proof that [he] is now one of Canada’s very best writers.” Rawi Hage, winner of the Prix des libraires du Québec and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, returns with Cockroach, acclaimed in the Ottawa Citizen as “an amazingly original and brilliant novel that shows he is no one-hit wonder, but a major force in Canadian literature.”

$15 General / $10 Student or Senior / Free for Members
Day Pass: $40

Event curator Sarah Dearing, winner of the City of Toronto Book Award, hosts a spirited, honest discussion about the current state of Canadian fiction. This conversation grows from James Kellman’s Festival appearance a number of years ago, when he rather vehemently accused Canadian writers of having “one foot planted in Old England, the other in New England without a truthful voice of our own.” Join the conversation with Stephen Henighan, author of The Afterlife of Culture, Terry Fallis, recipient of this year’s Leacock Prize for his self-published novel, Best Laid Plans, and ReLit winner Bill Gaston, the acclaimed author of The Order of Good Cheer.

$15 General / $10 Student or Senior / Free for Members
Day Pass: $40

CBC Radio’s Laurence Wall hosts Joseph Boyden, winner of the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the McNally Robinson Aboriginal Book of the Year Award for his first novel, Three Day Road, an international phenomenon.

His follow-up, Through Black Spruce, is a powerful novel of contemporary Aboriginal life, full of the dangers and harsh beauty of both forest and city. Through Black Spruce is an unforgettable consideration of how we discover who we really are. Tomson Highway calls it “an arresting novel with unexpected twists and turns” and “an important contribution to the Native literary voice in this country.”

$15 General / $10 Student or Senior / Free for Members
Day Pass: $40

Don’t miss the 2008 ReLit Awards ceremony and readings. Congratulate the winners and pick up a free book from the 2008 ReLit longlist! This year’s winner for Short Fiction is Long After Fathers by Roberta Rees (Coteau). The Poetry Award goes to Soft Geography by Gillian Wigmore (Caitlin), the Novel Award to The Outlander by Gil Adamson (Anansi).

A free event.