A trio of writers from Southwest Saskatchewan have been nominated for 2012 Saskatchewan Book Awards.
Candace Savage, Arthur Slade and Sean Virgo are among the finalists in the Saskatchewan Book Awards which selects winners in 14 different award categories. This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Saskatchewan Book Awards.
Candace Savage is a finalist in a pair of award categories for her book A Geography of Blood: Unearthing Memory from a Prairie Landscape (Greystone Books). Savage is one of six finalists in the prestigious Book of the Year category plus she is one of the shortlisted finalists in the Non-Fiction Award category. Last year Savage won the 2012 Hilary Weston Writers Trust prize for Nonfiction in Canada for A Geography of Blood.
Savage was the winner of the SBA's 2004 Book of the Year Award and Non-Fiction Book Award for Prairie, A Natural History, and in 2002 her book Wizards was the SBA's Children's Literature Award winner.
Sean Virgo from Eastend is nominated in the Fiction category for his book Dibidalen. Virgo, who has been a Southwest resident for the past decade, has published a number of poetry books and works of fiction over a four decade writing career, with his most recent works including A Traveller Came By (2000); nonagon fugue (2007); and Begging Questions (2007).
Former Gull Lake resident Arthur Slade is among the four finalists in the Young Adult Literature Award for his latest work The Island of Doom. The Island of Doom is the fourth and final book in his multi-award winning series The Hunchback Assignments. Slade's works have earned him a series of Saskatchewan Book Award nominations over the year, and he won the SBA Young Adult Literature Award in 2010 for The Dark Deeps: The Hunchback Assignments II; the SBA Children's Literature Award in 2006 for Megiddo's Shadow. His novel Dust earning both the Saskatchewan Book Award in the Children's Literature category along with and the 2001 Governor General's Literary Award.
2012 Saskatchewan Book Awards will be handed out at a gala banquet in Regina on April 27, with Southwest award winning author Sharon Butala the guest speaker for the evening.
