Sean Michaels

The Canadian Authors Association has announced the shortlists for its annual literary awards, recognizing excellent titles published by the country’s writers in the previous year.

The following finalists were selected from almost 300 nominations:

CAA Award for Fiction

• Ann-Marie MacDonald, Adult Onset (Knopf Canada)
• Sean Michaels, Us Conductors (Random House Canada)
• Miriam Toews, All My Puny Sorrows (Knopf Canada)

Lela Common Award for Canadian History

• Tim Cook, The Necessary War, Volume 1 (Allen Lane Canada)
• Marian Botsford Fraser, Acting for Freedom: Fifty Years of Civil Liberties in Canada (Second Story Press)
• Robert Wright, The Night Canada Stood Still: How the 1995 Quebec Referendum Nearly Cost Us Our Country (HarperCollins Canada)

CAA Award for Poetry

• Shane Book, Congotronic (House of Anansi Press)
• Tim Bowling, Circa Nineteen Hundred and Grief (Gaspereau Press)
• Erina Harris, The Stag Head Spoke (Wolsak and Wynn)

CAA Emerging Writer Award

• Kayla Czaga, For Your Safety Please Hold On (Nightwood Editions)
• Kim Fu, For Today I Am a Boy (HarperCollins Canada)
• Eliza Robertson, Wallflowers (Hamish Hamilton Canada)

The shortlisted authors will each perform a public reading from their nominated work on June 12 at Lakehead University in Orillia, Ontario, as part of the Canadian Authors’ CanWrite! conference. The winners will be announced the following evening at a public awards gala hosted by authors Anthony De Sa and James Bartleman, also held during the conference at Lakehead.