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 C.
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 indicate that it once grew alone but is now surrounded. Alison Calder's poems shine the light of a poet's curiosity on all manner of "natural occurrences,"...
Clean Sweep : A Crime Novel
Clark, Michael J.
Breathing life into the Stone Fort Treaty : an Anishinabe understanding of Treaty One
Craft, Aimée
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...
Runaway wives and rogue feminists : the origins of the women's shelter movement in Canada
Goodhand, Margo
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...
A great restlessness the life and politics of Dorise Nielsen
Johnston, Faith
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
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
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...
Talk
Nathanson, Michael
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
A large harmonium a novel
Sorensen, Sue
English Lit professor Janey Erlicksen wonders if she's coming unravelled, as her daily life progresses through the onslaught from work, friends and family, and her despotic toddler Little Max. Janey knows she should be trying to put her academic career on the map, but how? She'll...
Surviving the city
Spillett-Sumner, Tasha
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...
Older sister : not necessarily related
Wills, Jenny Heijun
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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