Journey Prize Winner Announced
Toronto, Ontario (Tuesday, November 18, 2008)

On November 17, 2008, The Writers’ Trust of Canada announced the winners of its eighth annual Writers’ Trust Awards. As part of this prestigious event, the $10,000 Writers’ Trust of Canada/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize was presented to Montreal-based writer Saleema Nawaz for her story “My Three Girls.” In recognition of the vital role literary journals play in discovering new writers, McClelland & Stewart also gave its own award of $2,000 to Prairie Fire, the magazine that first published and submitted Saleema Nawaz’s story. The finalists for the Journey Prize are Dana Mills for “Steaming for Godthab” (published by Geist) and Clea Young for “Chaperone” (published by Grain Magazine).

About the winning story, the jury had this to say:
“This tightly written piece accomplishes the impressive feat of condensing a novel’s worth of sorrows and joys into a few pages. Saleema Nawaz writes with grace and compassion about family dynamics and the ghosts that linger in the wake of tragedy.”

2008 Journey Prize Finalists Announced
Toronto, Ontario (Wednesday, October 1, 2008)

The Writers’ Trust of Canada has announced the finalists for the $10,000 Writers’ Trust of Canada/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize, which is awarded annually to a new and developing writer of distinction for a short story published in a Canadian literary journal in the previous year. Jurors Lynn Coady, Heather O’Neill, and Neil Smith chose the finalists from among the eleven stories published in The Journey Prize Stories 20: The Best of Canada’s New Writers, the contents of which were also selected by the independent jury. The winner will be announced during the eighth annual Writers’ Trust Awards, to be presented on Monday, November 17.

The finalists for The Journey Prize are:

Dana Mills for “Steaming for Godthab” (published by Geist)
After being aboard ship with one another for too long, a group of exhausted trawlermen land in Greenland, only to find their long-simmering resentments have followed them onto shore.

Dana Mills’s fiction has appeared in Geist. Born and raised in idyllic rural Nova Scotia, Mills lives and works in a cubicle in Toronto. He is completing a collection of stories entitled Blueprints for an Early Death.

Saleema Nawaz for “My Three Girls”(published by Prairie Fire)
Tired of living in the shadow of a family tragedy, two sisters make the choice to challenge the inevitability of misfortune, in a story of loss and the possibilities of redemption.

Saleema Nawaz is the author of the short story collection Mother Superior, published by Freehand Books. Her short fiction has appeared in literary journals such as Prairie Fire, PRISM international, Grain, and The New Quarterly. Born in Ottawa, she attended Carleton University and completed an M.A. in English Literature at the University of Manitoba in 2006. She now lives in Montreal, where she is at work on a novel.

Clea Young for “Chaperone” (published by Grain Magazine)
An unexpected showdown with his defiant teenage daughter during a class trip forces a man to realize that to keep his family together, he must be more than a chaperone in the girl’s life.

Clea Young’s poetry and short fiction have appeared in numerous Canadian literary magazines. This is her second nomination for The Journey Prize. She holds a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and currently lives in Vancouver, where she is working on a collection of stories and a novella.

The Journey Prize Stories 20 will be available in stores on October 28.