Three Centretown residents say they are both honoured and excited to see their names on the list of finalists for the 2012 Ottawa Book Awards.\
Shane Rhodes, Jamieson Findlay and Damien-Claude Belanger are competing with 13 other finalists for the annual awards given out since 1986.
“What makes my book more interesting is the sponsorships from different alcohol brands,” says Rhodes, author of the poetry collection Err. “I approached different breweries offering them to sponsor one of the poems in the section about alcohol. Their name is not in the poem itself, but is noted in the book as a sponsor of that poem.”
Err includes poems with subjects that include alcohol and HIV/AIDs.
Awards are only given when there are 10 submissions in a category, says Faith Seltzer the awards co-ordinator. Categories that are not filled one year will carry the nominations to the following year. This year the categories are fiction, non-fiction, and French non-fiction.
Belanger is among the top five finalists in the non-fiction category for his book, Prejudice and Pride: Canadians Intellectuals Confront the United States, 1891-1945.
Belanger says his book is likely the most scholarly of the non-fiction finalists. Now a professor at the University of Ottawa, his book stems from his doctoral dissertation done at McGill University.
“I have always been really interested in Canada-America relations,” Belanger says. “It took a number of years to transition the doctoral to a book, but I am honoured to be nominated.”
Findlay’s novel The Summer of Permanent Wants takes place on the Rideau Canal system, where an 11-year-old girl named Emmeline has lost her voice from a mysterious disease. Her grandmother takes her on a trip filled with a number of interesting characters aboard the boat Permanent Wants.
“It is quite a big deal to me to be a finalist,” Findlay says. “These awards are very impressive.”
Mayor Jim Watson will be presenting the awards at a ceremony at the Shenkman Arts Centre in Orleans on Oct. 24, which is being hosted by historian Charlotte Gray and cultural reporter Martin Vanasse from Radio-Canada.
“It is great to see how a city treats arts,” says Rhodes. “These books are collected and they really add to the culture of a city."