The Koffler Centre of the Arts has announced the finalists for the 2023 Vine Awards for Canadian Jewish Literature.

The annual awards honour Canadian writers who are Jewish or who deal with Jewish subjects across four categories: fiction, history, nonfiction, and YA/children’s literature. This year, a Vine Award for poetry is also being awarded.

The jury is comprised of authors Alain Goldschlager, Sidura Ludwig, and Syd Zolf. The winners will be announced at an awards ceremony on Oct. 12.

Fiction

• Gary Barwin, Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy (Random House Canada/Penguin Random House Canada)

• Rivka Galchen, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch (Harper Perennial/HarperCollins Publishers)

• Sheila Heti, Pure Colour (Knopf Canada/Penguin Random House Canada)

Non-Fiction

• Mark Braude, Kiki Man Ray: Art, Love, and Rivalry in 1920s Paris (W.W. Norton)

• Anais Granofsky, The Girl in the Middle: Growing Up Between Black and White, Rich and Poor (HarperAvenue/HarperCollins Publishers)

• Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture (Knopf Canada/PRHC)

History 

• Judy Battalion, The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos (HarperCollins)

• Mark Celinscak, Kingdom of Night: Witnesses to the Holocaust (University of Toronto Press)

• Jeffrey Veidinger, In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918-1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust (HarperCollins Publishers)

Poetry

• Leah Horlick, Moldovan Hotel (Brick Books)

• Aaron Kreuter, Shifting Baseline Syndrome (University of Regina Press)

• Adam Sol, Broken Dawn Blessings (ECW Press)

Young Adult/Children’s 

• Cary Fagan, Water, Water (Tundra Books)

• Charlotte Schallié, ed., But I Live: Three Stories of Child Survivors of the Holocaust (New Jewish Press/University of Toronto Press)

• Erin Silver, Sitting Shiva (Orca Book Publishers)