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CBC
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Tanya Talaga and André Alexis among longlisted authors for 2025 Toronto Book Award
Social Sharing Tanya Talaga and André Alexis are among the longlisted authors for the 2025 Toronto Book Award. Established by Toronto City Council in 1974, the Toronto Book Awards honour books that are inspired by the city. This year, the prize amounts were doubled, with the winner receiving $20,000 and the shortlisted writers each winning $2,000. Talaga is longlisted for her book, The Knowing, which charts the life of her great-great grandmother Annie and the violence she and her family suffered at the hands of the Catholic Church and Canadian government. "I had to find out about Annie," said Talaga on Bookends with Mattea Roach. "I was just enraptured by her. I mean, she's been a mystery for my entire family for over 80 years. "Part of the reason why I wrote this book ... was to empower other First Nations people to do the same thing, to try and look back. And by looking back in our family trees, we're going to find those people that are crying out to be found. They need to be recognized and heard." The Knowing is also a four-part documentary, which can be streamed on CBC Gem. Talaga is a journalist, author and filmmaker of Anishinaabe and Polish descent and a member of the Fort William First Nation. Talaga also wrote the nonfiction work Seven Fallen Feathers, which also won the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing in 2018. Seven Fallen Feathers also received the RBC Taylor Prize and the First Nation Communities Read: Young Adult/Adult Award. In her 2018 CBC Massey Lectures series, titled All Our Relations, Talaga explored the legacy of cultural genocide against Indigenous peoples. Canada Reads -winning author Alexis is longlisted for his short story collection Other Worlds. Spanning from 19th-century Trinidad and Tobago to a small town in Ontario, from Amherst, Massachusetts to modern-day Toronto, Other Worlds explores characters encountering moments of profound puzzlement in these diverse settings. André Alexis tries to answer a question we've all wondered: what if dogs had human consciousness? Alexis was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, and raised in Ottawa. His debut novel, Childhood, won the Books in Canada First Novel Award (now known as the Amazon First Novel Award) and the Trillium Book Award, and was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. His other books include Pastoral, Asylum, The Hidden Keys, Despair and Other Stories of Ottawa and Days by Moonlight, which won the 2019 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and was on the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist. André Alexis's novel Fifteen Dogs, championed by Humble The Poet, won Canada Reads 2017 and the 2015 Scotiabank Giller Prize. Many of the shortlisted books are available in accessible formats on the Centre for Equitable Library Access website. The complete longlist is below. The jury is comprised of Sam Hiyate, Sophie Jai, Wanda Nanibush, Don Oravec and David Silverberg. The shortlist will be announced later this summer. The winner will be named on October 15 at a ceremony in Toronto.
CTV News
30-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CTV News
A search for family through Canada's Indian residential school system
Montreal Watch 'The Knowing' director Courtney Montour speaks about the CSA-nominated project that explores family, community and strength in the face of residential schools.
CBC
02-04-2025
- Politics
- CBC
Tanya Talaga among finalists for $25K political writing prize for nonfiction work The Knowing
Social Sharing Tanya Talaga is among the shortlisted writers for the 2025 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing. The $25,000 prize is awarded annually for a book of literary nonfiction that embodies a political subject relevant to Canadian readers and Canadian political life. She is nominated for her book, The Knowing, which charts the life of her great-great grandmother Annie and the violence she and her family suffered at the hands of the Catholic Church and Canadian government. "I had to find out about Annie," said Talaga on Bookends with Mattea Roach. "I was just enraptured by her. I mean, she's been a mystery for my entire family for over 80 years. We're going to find those people that are crying out to be found. They need to be recognized and heard. "Part of the reason why I wrote this book ... was to empower other First Nations people to do the same thing, to try and look back. And by looking back in our family trees, we're going to find those people that are crying out to be found. They need to be recognized and heard." The Knowing is also a four-part documentary, which can be streamed on CBC Gem. Talaga is a journalist, author and filmmaker of Anishinaabe and Polish descent and a member of the Fort William First Nation. Talaga also wrote the nonfiction work Seven Fallen Feathers, which received the RBC Taylor Prize, the First Nation Communities Read: Young Adult/Adult Award and the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing. In her 2018 CBC Massey Lectures series, titled All Our Relations, Talaga explored the legacy of cultural genocide against Indigenous peoples. The other shortlisted writers for the Shaughnessy Cohen Prrize for Political Writing are Raymond B. Blake for Canada's Prime Ministers and the Shaping of a National Identity; Stephen Maher for The Prince, about Justin Trudeau's tenure as prime minister; Jane Philpott for Heath for All, a book the provides solutions to make Canada healthier; and Alasdair Roberts for The Adaptable Country, about how Canada can survive this century. They were chosen by jurors Jennifer Ditchburn, Sara Mojtehedzadeh and Christopher Waddell. All the titles are available in accessible formats through the Centre for Equitable Library Access. The winner will be announced on Sept. 24, 2025 at the Politics and the Pen gala. Last year's winner was John Vaillant's Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast. Other past winners include Kamal Al Solaylee, Beverley McLachlin, Jane Jacobs and Roméo Dallaire. The Shaughnessy Cohen Prize was established in honour of the Member of Parliament from Windsor, Ont. and is administered by the Writers' Trust of Canada. It is sponsored by CN and supported by the Politics and the Pen gala. The Writers' Trust of Canada is an organization that supports Canadian writers through 11 annual national literary awards, fellowships, financial grants, mentorships and more.
The Guardian
20-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Knowing by Madeleine Ryan review – intriguing ‘phone-free' premise falters in execution
Smartphones aren't nearly as intrusive in today's novels as they are in our daily realities. I suspect we don't want our fictional counterparts to stare at their phones as much as we do. Mobile technology can disrupt plot, and date fiction fast, and so some novelists opt to set their stories in times or places beyond its reach. Madeleine Ryan's solution in The Knowing is simpler. Her protagonist, Camille, lives in present-day country Victoria, commuting to a high-end floristry in Melbourne. But on the particular Valentine's Day the novel spans, Camille has left her phone at home. It's a plausible scenario and compelling premise, propelling Camille 'deeper into herself; deeper into all the places she'd rather not go' over the course of an otherwise ordinary day. Ryan is good on the startling discomfort of being phoneless; the absurdity of our addiction ('the current temperature isn't outside, it's on her phone'); and the way technology can suppress, soothe and provoke feeling. Camille reflects at one point on how she typically goes to her phone 'looking for relief and comes away from it feeling remorse'. It's also a clever device, enabling Ryan to interrogate grander questions around time and around knowledge. Phones are emblematic of a hustling mindset where optimisation, productivity and efficiency are the order of the day. Camille suspects they are 'altering her DNA'. She fantasises about having a different relationship to time, longing for the sense of 'immersion' of her ancestors, and envying the 'stillness' and 'steadfastness' of a stranger she meets in a sauna. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning As its title suggests, this is also a book concerned with epistemic questions. As in her debut novel A Room Called Earth, Ryan is primarily interested in embodied forms of knowledge, of the sort gained through introspection, intuition and observation. In The Knowing, Camille's lack of a phone is an invitation for her to experience the world in this more direct manner. The world is usually 'peripheral', but today it is 'a wonder waiting to be discovered'. At moments, she can feel it 'humming'. She recalls her very first encounter with her partner, Manny: they could sense the 'quite possibly ancient knowledge' that lay dormant between them; a knowledge 'intimidating' and 'intoxicating'. Knowledge, for Ryan, is also gendered. Camille ponders how the world is run by 'penises' and the female body is expected to adapt itself around 'whenever the workday begins and whenever a penis might want to tip its tip into it'. In Ryan's framing, women like Camille (who bleed and are emotional) are incompatible with this culture. Camille recalls an older woman she met at a music festival describing period pain as the 'collective feminine crying out in anguish … a call to slow down, and to become more receptive'. Ryan's casual references to the 'divine feminine' suggest similarly essentialist beliefs. Much of the novel's latter half comprises interactions between Camille and Holly, her toxic and ruthless boss. The contrast between Holly (exploitative, unfeeling) and Camille (victim, all-feeling) is a little black and white. Likewise, their respective strains of feminism (girlboss v mystical) edge into caricature. As a result, their exchanges become quite predictable, as does the narrative development. Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion The Knowing is ostensibly interested in what the likes of Camille might call 'presence'. So it's curious that its various moments of transcendence or epiphany – taking in a sunset, observing a woman in a burqa, admiring a floral arrangement – are situated in the past. The most physical and vivid scene (Manny helping remove Camille's menstrual cup) is also a memory. Granted, present attention can conjure and renew the past. But it means that as readers, we're at a remove, and the unfolding present-day narrative feels relatively lacklustre. Motifs from Ryan's first novel – flower essences, star signs, full moons, anti-medical rhetoric – re-appear. There is recurrent mention of the 'mystical', the 'sacred' and the 'ancient'. There is nothing wrong with any of this per se and The Knowing contains occasional moments of gentle lyricism. But it also contains sentences like this: 'Cultivating an enlivened mind-body connection is sacred'. I wanted Ryan to make a more concerted effort to find her own words for the indescribable and the mysterious, rather than resort to pre-packaged language that has a patina of spirituality, but contains no real trace of the author. In short, The Knowing has an intriguing premise, but falls short in its execution. Camille's fantasy of herself as 'engrossed' or 'consumed' by the world appears to remain a fantasy. I wanted richer observation of her present surroundings. I wanted to feel more precisely and viscerally how her attention shifted. And I wanted to venture far further into those 'places she'd rather not go'. The Knowing by Madeleine Ryan is out through Scribe ($29.99)
