Vancouver playwrights Kim Senklip Harvey and Christopher Cook join Governor-General's Literary Award finalists
Today’s postponed 2020 list also includes local authors Ivan Coyote, Billy-Ray Belcourt, and Lisa Robertson
KIM SENKLIP HARVEY’s Kamloopa: An Indigenous Matriarch Story and Christopher Cook’s Quick Bright Things have both been nominated for Governor General’s Literary Awards in the drama category.
The two plays are part of a strong Vancouver showing in the announcement of nominees this morning from the Canada Council for the Arts. Due to the pandemic last year, the Council had to postpone the 2020 campaign; the finalists were just announced this morning.
Syilx and Tsilhqot'in Nations artist Harvey’s Kamloopa was groundbreaking in the way it envisioned a new kind of decolonized Indigenous theatre; it debuted here at the Cultch stage in 2018. It is described as an Indigenous “artistic ceremony” that follows two urban Indigenous sisters and their new friend as they struggle in their own ways to understand themselves and their cultures. It’s the author, playwright, and director’s first time as a finalist for this award.
Quick Bright Things follows the protagonist and his adopted son as they visit the child’s birth mother after the child had been recently diagnosed with schizophrenia. Cook is a queer theatre artist and therapist who specializes in counselling members of the queer and trans communities.
Elsewhere from the West Coast, Ivan Coyote is a finalist in the nonfiction category for their work Rebent Sinner, a collection of short pieces on what it means to be trans and nonbinary today.
Vancouver’s Billy-Ray Belcourt is also nominated in the nonfiction category for A History of My Brief Body, a letter to his memories of early life in Alberta, and on the Driftpile First Nation,
And French-born Lisa Robertson is a finalist in the Fiction category for her book The Baudelaire Fractal. The story follows a young woman who awakens one morning to find that she’s written the complete works of revered French poet Charles Baudelaire.
The national awards hand out a total annual prize value of $450,000.
Seventy books in all have been nominated across 14 categories. You can find all the finalists here.
The final 14 winners will be announced on June 1. The 2021 nominees will then be announced at their regular time in fall 2021.
Related Articles
