The finalists for the Children's and Young Adult Blogger's Literary Awards (Cybils for short) have been announced for 2010. Amongst the finalists are McNally Robinson favourites such as We Are in a Book!, The Strange Case of Origami Yoda (our review), Shark vs. Train, Ship Breaker, and Some Girls Are. For a full list of all the finalists, see the Cybils website. The Cybil awards are given each year by bloggers for the year's best children's and young adult titles. Winners will be announced on February 14.

 

view cart

The Hunchback Assignments$18.99 add to cart

Congratulations are due for Saskatoon's Arthur Slade. On November 9, The Hunchback Assignments won the 2010 TD Canada Children's Literature Award, the children's literature equivalent of winning the Giller Prize.

Arthur Slade's steampunk thriller was selected from a stellar field of Canadian Children's Literature including Janet McNaughton's Dragon Seer, Sharon Jennings's Home Free, William Gilkerson's A Thousand Years of Pirates and Nancy Hartry's Watching Jimmy.

Arthur will be reading from the second book in his Hunchback Assignments Series, The Dark Deeps, at Saskatoon's Young Adult Author Extravaganza on November 25.

'Tis the season for awards announcements! Today we have two:

Saskatchewan native Arthur Slade has won the $25,000 TD Canadian Children's Literature award for The Hunchback Assignments.

"As an exciting spy thriller for young audiences, Arthur Slade's The Hunchback Assignments embodies the creativity and dedication to children's literature we hope to encourage with the TD Canadian Children's Literature Award," says Frank McKenna, Deputy Chair, TD Bank Financial Group and TD's Literacy Champion. "It's well known that developing a love for reading at an early age can help create a lasting relationship with books. The Hunchback Assignments is that electrifying, page-turning story we need to keep our young readers engaged." (source)

Also, Polly Horvath has won the $20,000 Vicky Metcalf award, which honours a body of work. As the Writers' Trust website says,

Polly Horvath has a lively, daring imagination that expresses itself in children's novels that balance the lyrical with the mordant, the poignant with the darkly absurd. Her earliest works tend towards the light and comic; her middle works towards the black-humoured, gothic and brave; her most recent are softer and tinged with wonder. In truth, though, all her novels have all these qualities in different measure, and in all she confronts the inexplicable vagaries of human nature with an inimitable, stylish blend of satire, wit and compassion.

Congratulations to both authors!

The Sunburst Awards, celebrating Canadian literature of the fantastic, have released the winners in both adult and young adult categories. Congratulations to A.M. Dellamonica, whose debut novel Indigo Springs, won the adult award and Hiromi Goto, whose Half World took the young adult award.

On Indigo Springs the jurors had this to say:

"Original, passionate, lyrical and powerful, entertaining and terrifying at once, Dellamonica's debut novel examines how both good intentions and good people can be overthrown by the temptations of power."

On Half World:

"Goto's style is gruesome rather than gory; neither horror nor dark fantasy but entirely original and unclassifiable. Richly imagined phantasmagoric scenes decorate every iridescent page. Goto's stylish incendiary prose lifts Half World above the YA category; this novel crosses age boundaries and could just as easily be categorized as a book for adults."

The jurors for the 2010 award were Don Bassingthwaite, Gemma Files, Susie Moloney, Ursula Pflug and Edward Willett. In 2011 the jurors will be Julie E. Czerneda, Kate Freiman, Mark Leslie, Christopher Roden and Alison Sinclair.

Dellamonica was interviewed by McNally Robinson upon Indigo Springs' release. You can read a review of her award winning novel here.