Debuts earn kudos in Quebec writer awards

New voices on the Quebec literary scene were honoured in Montreal Tuesday night, as the Quebec Writers' Federation presented its annual literary awards.

The group, created in 1998 to promote, encourage and represent English-language writers in Quebec, presented eight awards at a gala hosted by Just for Laughs co-founder Andy Nulman.

Montreal-based Filipino author Miguel Syjuco earned the fiction prize for his debut novel Illustrado, a tale of a young writer dealing with his late mentor's apparent suicide, layered with an account of Philippine history and culture.

Illustrado won both the Man Asian Literary Prize and the Palanca Prize in the Philippines in 2008, when it was still an unpublished manuscript.

Fellow Montrealer and poet Kate Hall was also a winner for her first-time effort, the inaugural collection The Certainty Dream. Shortlisted for the 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize, Hall's collection "makes its formal and intellectual investigations not only relevant and engaging, but often startlingly fresh, and frank," said the poetry prize jury.

Quebec history scholar Sean Mills picked up the first book prize for The Empire Within, his exploration of activism in Montreal during the 1960s.

Montreal-based, Cape Breton-born teacher and writer Caryl Cude Mullinwas the children's and young adult literature-winner for Rough Magic, a tale inspired by William Shakespeare's The Tempest and her sophomore effort.

Mullin "never loses her grip on the reader," the jury said. "This is a surprising book, an artful book, and a wonderful new voice in Canadian children's literature."

Other winners include:

• Non-fiction prize Geopolitical expert and writer Cleo Paskal for her book Global Warring, which the jury called "required reading for political thinkers, environmentalists, and anyone curious about how the future is rapidly unfolding."
• Translation prize Paule Champoux for Qubec, ville du patrimoine mondial (her translation of David Mendel's Quebec, World Heritage City).

Each category-winner receives $2,000. Past QWF literary prize recipients have included Rawi Hage, Taras Grescoe, Mordecai Richler, Anne Carson, Heather O'Neill, Sheila Fischman, Erin Mour and Yann Martel.

Special honours went to Ilona Martonfi, the founder of The Yellow Door Poetry and Prose Reading series (QWF Community Award), and Mark Paterson (carte blanche prize), whose story Something Important and Delicate was deemed the best submission to the federation's online literary journal, carte blanche, this year.

Organizers also announced the winners of the Quebec Writers Competition, an annual contest celebrating unpublished work by English-language writers in the province. Taqralik Partridge nabbed the first-place spot, while Michele Ann Jenkins and Joshua Levy placed second.