Selecting the shortlist for the 2018 Jacob Zilber Prize for Short Fiction was a difficult and competitive process this year, so congratulations to the writers of the five stories below!
Thank you again to everyone who submitted, and to those who placed on this year’s longlist! Check back soon for the winners announcement, chosen by this year’s contest judge, Thalia Field!
Continue reading 2018 Jacob Zilber Prize for Short Fiction Shortlist
The Boat People
Sharon Bala
Penguin Random House
Review by Anjalika Samarasekera
In the second half of The Boat People, a Sri Lankan immigrant—and former Tamil Tiger—poses a question to his Canadian-born niece: “What do you think happens when you terrorize a people, force them to flee, take away their options then put them in a cage all together?” (230).
The question is the ravaged heart of Sharon Bala’s remarkable debut novel, which chronicles the arrival of around 400 Tamil refugees on the coast of British Columbia in 2010. The refugees have fled persecution in Sri Lanka following the end of the twenty-six-year civil war and have come to Canada hoping for a warm welcome. These hopes are dashed when the Canadian government detains the refugees on the suspicion that some of them belong to the LTTE, also known as the Tamil Tigers, a listed terrorist organization. Eventually, some refugees are released and deemed “admissible” to Canada while others are deported back to Sri Lanka.
Continue reading The Survival of Arrival: A Review of Sharon Bala’s The Boat People
Chelene Knight’s debut poetry collection, Braided Skin, was celebrated as a vibrant telling of mixed ethnicity and urban childhood poverty. Her sophomore book Dear Current Occupant, a creative nonfiction memoir, is a nuanced account of growing up in Vancouver’s Downtown...
We’re excited to announce that the following stories have been longlisted for the 2018 Jacob Zilber Prize for Short Fiction!
Thank you to everyone who submitted. Check back soon for the shortlist announcement, followed by the winners chosen by this year’s contest judge, Thalia Field!
Continue reading 2018 Jacob Zilber Prize for Short Fiction Longlist
Interview by Kyla Jamieson
Anita Cheung is a Vancouver-based entrepreneur and creative who recently launched one of our new favourite websites, whereareyoureallyfrom.org (WAYRF), which features the portraits of twenty-one women of colour alongside interview clips and insights. The project evolved from Cheung’s personal investigation into what it means to be a woman of colour, particularly in our current political climate. “We are just as diverse and complex as our white counterparts,” Cheung says, and she wanted to hear “how others saw and experienced their own coloured-ness.”
Buying books looked a lot different thirty years ago. If you wanted to know how good a book was, you read a newspaper, or asked your friends for recommendations. Then you had to find the physical copy on a...
PRISM international is excited and pleased to announce the call for submissions for our next themed issue 57.1: DREAMS
Interview by Kyla Jamieson Andrea Gibson is a highly quotable and influential poet at the forefront of the spoken-word movement who has headlined prestigious performance venues across the United States and abroad. Born in Calais, Maine, Gibson now resides...
Interview by Matthew Walsh
Over last summer, during Toronto Pride season, I got to have a conversation over Twitter with poet and lawyer Marcus McCann about his new collection of poetry, Shut Up Slow Down Let Go Breathe published with Invisible Publishing. McCann’s collection focuses on gay relationships, dating, homophobia, but it doesn’t stop there, moving from very serious material to tender and funny anecdotes about dating and acceptance of one’s identity. We got to talk about the poetry scene in Toronto, the Naked Heart reading series, and Glad Day Bookstore and Café, where Marcus is part-owner.
Continue reading Shut Up Slow Down Let Go Breathe: An Interview with Marcus McCann