2019 Lambda Award winners

The winners of the 31st Lambda Literary Awards, which honour the best in LGBTQ literature of the past year, were announced at a gala in New York City on June 3rd.

We are especially thrilled to see Casey Plett, a former McNally Robinson bookseller, has again won the Transgender Fiction Award, this time for her novel Little Fish. Plett initially won this award in 2015 for her book A Safe Girl to Love.

Also of particular note is Manitoban writer Joshua Whitehead's win of the Gay Fiction Award for his novel Jonny Appleseed.

Congratulations to Plett and Whitehead, and to all of the other winners of this year's Lammys! You can find a full list of the winners after the jump...

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June's Author of the Month: ANTHONY HOROWITZ

Anthony Horowitz is one of the most prolific and successful writers working in the UK today. Horowitz juggles writing books, TV series, films, plays and articles for a wide variety of newspapers and magazines. He was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his services to literature in 2014.

Horowitz has written over 40 books including the bestselling teen spy series Alex Rider. He is also an acclaimed writer for adults and was commissioned by the Conan Doyle Estate to write two new Sherlock Holmes novels. The House of Silk was published in 2011 and was internationally lauded. The sequel, Moriarty, was published in 2014 with similar success. He was commissioned by the Ian Fleming Estate to write the James Bond novel Trigger Mortis, which was published in 2015. It was followed by a second novel, Forever and A Day, which came out in 2018.

Horowitz is responsible for creating and writing some of the UK’s most successful television series, producing the first seven episodes of Midsomer Murders. He is the writer and creator of the award-winning drama series Foyle’s War. Horowitz has also written other original dramas for ITV. His most recent show New Blood premiered on BBC in 2016.

Bestselling author Anthony Horowitz and eccentric detective Daniel Hawthorne team up again in a new mystery, The Sentence is Death, the sequel to the brilliantly inventive The Word Is Murder. They delve deep into the killing of a high-profile divorce lawyer and the death, only a day earlier, of a one-time friend. (Softcover. $24.99. RRC Price $22.49. HarperCollins. June)

The Man Booker International Prize 2019 winners

Last night at a ceremony in London, the winners of the 2019 Man Booker International Prize were announced.

Congratulations to author Jokha Alharthi and translator Marilyn Booth, who won for the book Celestial Bodies, and who will share equally the £50,000 (approximately $85,000 Canadian) prize.

Celestial Bodies tells the story of three sisters in the Oman village of al-Awafi: Mayya, who marries Abdallah after a heartbreak; Asma, who marries from a sense of duty; and Khawla, who rejects all offers while waiting for her beloved, who has emigrated to Canada. These three women and their families witness Oman evolve from a traditional, slave-owning society slowly redefining itself after the colonial era, to the crossroads of its complex present.

Please note that at the time of this announcement, there is no North American edition of Celestial Bodies available for us to order. However, with the book receiving such a pretigious honour we expect an edition will be available to us soon, so please check with your nearest McNally Robinson in coming weeks.

The Winnipeg General Strike Centennial Anniversary

The Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 was one of the most famous and influential strikes in Canadian history, and became the platform for future labour reforms. Almost 30,000 workers left their jobs and even essential public employees such as firefighters and police went on strike. The RCMP were called in and the strike came to a violent end on what is referred to as "Bloody Saturday." This year marks the 100th anniversary of the strike, and there are plenty of new books on the subject to explore.

Winnipeg 1919 edited by Norman Penner. Following the strike, union leaders published an account of the events leading up to and during the strike. This book offers the full document in its original format along with an introduction to the 1974 edition by labour historian and activist Norman Penner. This volume also includes a new introduction by historian Christo Aivalis discussing how the lessons learned in 1919 remain relevant today, and key documentary photographs of strike events, including a minute-by-minute sequence showing the final RCMP fatal assault on the strikers.

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