Vancouver's Lyon up for first novel award

Vancouver's Annabel Lyon, who won the Writer's Trust best novel award for The Golden Mean, has now been nominated for the first novel award for Canadian writers..

The Golden Mean, about Aristotle teaching the young Alexander the Great, was also nominated for the Giller Prize and a Governor General's Literary Award.

The $7,500 First Novel Award is administered by Amazon.ca with Quill and Quire.

The other five finalists:

• No Place Strange by Diana Fitzgerald Bryden, about a romance between a Jewish girl and a Lebanese boy that is complicated by the turmoil in Beirut in the 1970s.
• Come, Thou Tortoise by Jessica Grant, about a woman who flies home to St. John's N.L., when her father is injured, and stumbles across some dark secrets in her family's past.
• Goya's Dog by Damian Tarnopolsky, about a British artist who thinks he'll find his fortune in Second World War-era Toronto.
• Diary of Interrupted Days by Dragan Todorovic,about a man returning to his native Belgrade.
• Daniel O'Thunder by Ian Weir of B.C., about a prize-fighting evangelist in 1850s London.

Judges include Joseph Boyden, author of Through Black Spruce, Priscila Uppal, a Toronto-based poet and novelist, and Hal Wake, the artistic director of the Vancouver International Writers Festival.

The winner will be announced in April. Previous winners include Michael Ondaatje, Nino Ricci, Anne Michaels and Joseph Boyden.