"Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very;" your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be."
The six finalists for the 2009 Amazon.ca First Novel Award include an already award-winning historical epic set in ancient Greece, and the inaugural selection of The Afterword Reading Society.
The nominees for the prize, which is awarded to a writer to published a first novel in 2009, are:
• No Place Strange by Diana Fitzgerald Bryden, Key Porter Books• Come, Thou Tortoise by Jessica Grant, Knopf Canada• The Golden Mean by Annabel Lyon, Random House Canada• Goya’s Dog by Damian Tarnopolsky, Hamish Hamilton Canada• Diary of Interrupted Days by Dragan Todorovic, Random House Canada• Daniel O’Thunder by Ian Weir, Douglas & McIntyre
The finalists were selected by Stuart Woods, editor of industry magazine Quill & Quire, who are co-presenting this year's prize. The winner will be selected by a panel of judges featuring Joseph Boyden, who won the award in 2005; poet, novelist and professor Priscila Uppal; and Hal Wake, the artistic director of the Vancouver International Writers Festival.
This marks the 34th year the prize has been awarded. The winner, who receives $7,500, will be announced in April. Past winners include Michael Ondaatje (1976) ,Nino Ricci (1990), Rohinton Mistry (1991), Anne Michaels (1996), Michael Redhill (2001), Colin McAdam (2004), Joseph Boyden (2005), and Gil Adamson (2007).
Last year the prize was won by Joan Thomas, whose second novel, Curiosity, comes out next month.
“We’re
excited that the First Novel Award has become a means for readers to
discover great Canadian literature,” said John Nemeth, director,
Amazon.ca, in a press release.
Well-known writers who have suffered from writer's block include George Gissing, Samuel Coleridge, Ralph Ellison, Joseph Mitchell and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Writers who overcame writer's block and published new work after a hiatus of decades include Harold Brodkey, whose novel The Runaway Soul appeared some 30 years after it was first projected, and Henry Roth, whose first novel, Call It Sleep, was published in 1934; his second, Mercy Of A Rude Stream, did not appear until 1994.