WINNIPEG, MB – Celebrating 20 years of exceptional Manitoba writers, the Manitoba Writers’ Guild and McNally Robinson Booksellers will pay tribute to Manitoba’s writing community this weekend. Three UWinnipeg writers are among those up for book awards – Hans Werner, Perry Nodelman and Deborah Schnitzer – have each been nominated in different categories.
The winners will be announced on Saturday, April 26, 2008 at 7:30 pm at the Winnipeg Art Gallery (Muriel Richardson Auditorium), 300 Memorial Blvd. Admission is free and everyone is welcome to attend.
Imagined Homes: Soviet German Immigrants in Two Cities by Werner is nominated for the Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award for Non-Fiction. This award is presented to the Manitoba writer whose work is considered the best adult non-fiction book written in English.
Werner teaches Canadian History and Mennonite Studies at UWinnipeg. His first book was a history of Winkler completed in 2006. Imagined Homes, his second book, is based on the migrations of ethnic Germans from the former Soviet Union.
Nodelman’s story Not a Nickel to Spare (part of Scholastic’s “Dear Canada” series) is up for the McNally Robinson Book for Young People Award. This award goes to the best English-language book for young people, written by a Manitoba author and published in 2007.
Nodelman is professor emeritus of children’s literature at UWinnipeg. He is the author of The Same Place but Different, A Completely Different Place, Behaving Bradley and co-author of The Proof That Ghosts Exist. His books about children’s literature include Words About Pictures: The Narrative Art of Children’s Picture Books (U of Georgia Press), The Pleasures of Children’s Literature (Allyn & Bacon), and The Hidden Adult: Definitions of Children’s Literature, forthcoming this fall from Johns Hopkins University Press.
Schnitzer’s novel Gertrude Unmanageable is competing for the Manuela Dias Book Design of the Year Award. This award is presented to a Manitoba publisher and designer for the book deemed to have the best overall design.
Schnitzer is a Professor of English Literature at UWinnipeg, a 3M Teaching Fellow and the author of two books of poetry: Black Beyond Blue (Staccato Press, 1997) and Loving Gertrude Stein (Turnstone Press, 2004).
