Rawi Hage wins best novel award from Quebec writers' group

Montreal's Rawi Hage has won the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for fiction given by the Quebec Writers' Federation for his novel, Cockroach.

Cockroach was shortlisted for the Giller Prize, Governor General's Literary Award and Writers' Trust Award this year, but failed to win any of them.

But it appears his angry protagonists and bleak picture of life in Montreal for the have-not class appeals to Quebec juries.

The jury called Hage's novel, his second, "literary achievement of the best kind: it's imaginative and musical, psychologically layered and page-by-page suspenseful, about a character whose position we can all appreciate, though we'd rather not be thereourselves, on the edge of oblivion."

Cockroach tells the story of a recent immigrant to Montreal, trying to survive on welfare and minimum wage.

It's the second time Hage has won the QWF best novel prize his first book, De Niro's Game, won in 2006.

The Quebec Writers' Federation announced winners of six awards, each with a cash prize of $2,000, on Wednesday evening.

Taras Grescoe won the Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-fiction for Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood, an engaging exploration of seafood on menus around the world and where it comes from.

While it explores the environmental impact of modern fishing, Grescoe's book also "provides answers and comfort in a doomsday world that is too often prone to make people feel glum and hopeless," the jury said.

Bottomfeeder won the Writers' Trust non-fiction award earlier this week.

Another non-fiction food tale won the McAuslan First Book Prize. Adam Leith Gollner won the award for his behind-the-scenes look into the world of fruit, The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce and Obsession.

He was nominated for the non-fiction prize for the same book, but lost out to Grescoe.

A new award, for children's and young adult literature, went to Raquel Rivera for her book Orphan Ahwak, about a young aboriginal girl struggling to survive on her own after her family is killed.

Rivera "inserts just the right amount of magic into what is otherwise a very realistic account of a girl's struggle to transform herself from a dependent child into a lone-wolf hunter," the jury said.

Other winners were:

• A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry: Peter Richardson, Sympathy for the Couriers.
• Translation Prize: Lori Saint-Martin and Paul Gagn, for Big Bang, the French translation of Neil Smith's Bang Crunch.
• Carte Blanche Prize ($250, forthe best submission to the QWF's online literary magazine): J. R. Carpenter's Wyoming is Haunted.