Charlotte Gray

The City of Ottawa has honoured three of its authors with its annual literary awards, offering $7,500 in each of three categories for titles that are most evocative of the nation’s capital.

The prolific John Metcalf won in the English-language fiction category for The Museum at the End of the World (Biblioasis), his comedic collection of linked stories and novellas about a writer and his and wife, while renowned historian and author Charlotte Gray received the English-language non-fiction prize for her Canadian retrospective The Promise of Canada: 150 Years – People and Ideas That Have Shaped Our Country (Simon & Schuster Canada). The French-language fiction prize, the Prix du livre D’Ottawa, went to Andrée Christensen for her poetry collection Épines d’encre (Les Éditions David).

Finalists, who included Peggy Blair, Nadia Bozak, and Faizal Deen, each received a $1,000 prize at the awards ceremony, which took place at Ottawa city hall’s Jean Pigott Place on Oct. 18.