Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best First Book Winners

The Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best First Book is presented annually to a Manitoba writer whose first professionally-published English- language book is deemed the best written.

Updated April 30, 2024
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Wolf Tree
Calder, Alison
Paper Book
A first collection of sharp, clever, wicked poems that range from images of circus freaks and two-headed calves to snow geese and wind in the pines. A wolf tree is a tree in a bush or a thicket which is different in shape from those around it; a tree whose broader trunk and spreading branches...
Stealing Mercury
Cayer, Lori
Paper Book
Lori Cayer's poems perform a kind of surgery, exposing the blind, interior terrain of the human body, navigating its hidden "forests and silt deposits," and peeling back the layers of family life until we can see the "glistening knot of bone" beneath. These poems are about risk-takers: a daring...
Clean sweep : a crime novel
Clark, Michael J.
Paper Book
A reformed smuggler finds himself embroiled in a mind-bending criminal conspiracy in this page-turning debut Pastor Tommy Bosco runs a Winnipeg skid row mission that caters to ex-criminals and ex-addicts trying to make a better life. Sometimes that better life means leaving the city -- and the good...
Breathing life into the Stone Fort Treaty : an Anishinabe understanding of Treaty One
Craft, Aime?e
Paper Book
In order to interpret and implement a treaty between the Crown and Canada's First Nations, we must look to its spirit and intent, and consider what was contemplated by the parties at the time the treaty was negotiated, argues Aimée Craft. Using a detailed analysis of Treaty One - today covering what...
Shelterbelts
Dyck, Jonathan
Paper Book
Progress isn't always a straight line.When a non-denominational megachurch opens on the edges of a rural Mennonite community, a quiet--but longstanding battle--begins to reveal itself. For years, the traditionalists in the community have held fast to the values and beliefs they grew up with,...
Sonar
Enright, Kristian
Paper Book
Ginsberg saw the best minds of his generation destroyed by madness -- but what is madness? In a world that has traded Hansel and Gretel's breadcrumbs for Prozac and where zombies masquerade as the living, who is really mad? Through the eyes of an artist boxed in by tradtition, Kristian Enright's...
Runaway wives and rogue feminists : the origins of the women's shelter movement in Canada
Goodhand, Margo
Paper Book
In the supposedly enlightened '60s and '70s, violence against women was widespread. It wasn't talked about, and women had few, if any, options to escape their abusers. Yet in 1973 -- with no statistics, no money and little public support -- five disparate groups of Canadian women quietly opened...
We Are All Perfectly Fine: A Memoir of Love, Medicine and Healing
Horton, Jillian
Paper Book
When we need help, we count on doctors to put us back together. But what happens when doctors fall apart? Funny, fresh, and deeply affecting, We Are All Perfectly Fine is the story of a married mother of three on the brink of personal and professional collapse who attends rehab with a...
A great restlessness : the life and politics of Dorise Nielsen
Johnston, Faith
Paper Book
Dorise Nielsen was a pioneering feminist, a radical politician, the first Communist elected to Canadaís House of Commons, and the only woman elected in 1940. But despite her remarkable career, until now little has been known about her.From her youth in London during World War I to her burial in 1980...
August Witch: Poems
Mayor, Chandra
Paper Book
Chandra Mayor's debut collection of poems takes the reader into realms of problematic desire, revised domesticity and psychoanalytic complexity through texts that span diverse poetic terrain, from the lyric to the narrative-based long poem. What links all the poems in this collection is the theme of...
Persephone's children : a life in fragments
McCandless, Rowan
Paper Book
Finalist for 2022 Governor General's Literary Award for Non-Fiction * Co-Winner of 2022 Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best First Book After years of secrecy and silence, Rowan McCandless leaves an abusive relationship and rediscovers her voice and identity...
High speed crow
McClarty, Sheila
Paper Book
Talk
Nathanson, Michael
Paper Book
Talk is a funny, complex, and touching look at a friendship torn asunder by clashing views about the Middle East conflict, examining both the power of language and the nature of friendship.Winner of the 2010 CAA Carol Bolt Award
Working North: DEW Line to Drill Ship
Ranson, Rick
Paper Book
Ranson skillfully recreates his northern experience in strong#44; crisp stories that are humorous#44; quirky#44; and unique#46; Working North makes it clear why Ranson was moved to "pity the southerner who has never seen an arctic sun skipping along the earth#44; gathering all the colours of...
The prairie bridesmaid
Salamon, Daria.
Paper Book
Anna Lasko is a frustrated schoolteacher in her thirties. While her almost-but-not-quite ex-boyfriend Adam is on a work assignment in Europe, Anna finds herself tricked into a ditch-the-loser intervention by her supportive yet meddling girlfriends. More frustrated than ever, Anna starts to...
Tell them it was Mozart
Schellenberg, Angeline
Paper Book
Linked poems that uncover the ache and whimsy of raising children on the autism spectrum. Through public judgments, detouring dreams and unspoken prayers, Tell Them It Was Mozart, Angeline Schellenberg's debut collection, traces both a slow bonding and the emergence of a...
Magpie Days
Sciberras, Brenda
Paper Book
Clever and persistent, Magpie Days, the debut poetry collection from Brenda Sciberras, picks through the baubles and trinkets of the everyday. And like the black and white plumage of the magpie, Sciberrasââ'¬â"¢s poems balance the exquisite tension between joy and misery. Evoking life-defining...
A Large Harmonium
Sorensen, Sue
Paper Book
Surviving the city
Spillett, Tasha
Paper Book
Miikwan and Dez are best friends. Miikwan is Anishinaabe; Dez is Inninew. Together, the teens navigate the challenges of growing up in an urban landscape--they're so close, they even completed their Berry Fast together. However, when Dez's grandmother becomes too sick, Dez is told she can't stay...
The secret of the jade bangle
Trinh, Linda
Paper Book
"Engaging and empowering." --STARRED review, Nonstop Reader A charming early chapter book series that explores Vietnamese culture and identity through the eyes of the Nguyen siblings, with elements of the supernatural, spirituality, and social justice woven in.  Organized and...
An ordinary decent criminal
Van Rooy, Michael
Paper Book
Older sister : not necessarily related
Wills, Jenny Heijun
Paper Book
Winner of the 2019 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction A beautiful and haunting memoir of kinship and culture rediscovered. Jenny Heijun Wills was born in Korea and adopted as an infant into a white family in small-town Canada. In her late twenties, she...

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