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Works by singer-songwriter Jann Arden, playwright Clem Martini and Calgary’s former poet laureate Natalie Meisner have been named finalists for this 12 months’s W.O. Mitchell Guide Prize.
The finalists had been introduced Monday morning and embrace Arden’s darkly comedic household saga, The Bittlemores, Martini’s e-book of two performs, Canata and the Extinction Therapist, and Meisner’s poetry assortment, It Begins in Salt.
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Town’s e-book awards had been based in 1996 and named after CanLit legend W.O. Michell, who spent his latter years in Calgary. The prize is a partnership between the Metropolis of Calgary and The Writers’ Guild of Alberta. Previous winners embrace Rona Altrow’s A Run On Hose and Sharon Butala’s Season of Fury and Surprise.
Revealed by Penguin Random Home Canada, The Bittlemores is Arden’s debut novel and tells the darkish coming-of-age and thriller story of a dysfunctional household dwelling in rural Alberta. Martini’s Cantata: Rumours of My Loopy Ineffective Life is about elder care and psychological sickness, whereas his play The Extinction Therapist is about a health care provider who gives group help to sufferers threatened with extinction, together with a woolly mammoth, a short-eared shrew, the smallpox virus and a Tyrannosaurus rex.

Meisner’s It Begins in Salt is a set of poems that “discover the methods the center grows” whereas wandering “the halls of an ocean blue-collar life whereas rummaging the center areas of rising up, and evolves into mothering, labours and loves.” Meisner served as Calgary’s fifth poet laureate from 2020 to 2022.
There have been 56 submissions this 12 months. The winner shall be introduced on June 12 as a part of the annual Calgary Awards.
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