The 2021 Lambda Literary Award winners

To kick off Pride Month, the Lambda Literary Awards (also known as the "Lammys") announced their 2021 winners on June 1.

The Lammy winners are consistently fantastic and this year is no different. Congratulations to all of them!

Of particular note to our regional interest, the anthology Love After The End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction edited by Joshua Whitehead and featuring a story from David A. Robertson won in the LGBTQ Anthology category.

You can find the complete list of winners after the jump.

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Thomas King wins 2020 Leacock Medal

Thomas King is the winner of the 2020 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour for his novel Indians on Vacation, published last year by HarperCollins Publishers. Along with the medal itself, he has received a prize of $15,000. 

The two runners-up were Joseph Kertes for his novel Last Impressions and Murray Morgan for his novel Dirty Birds.

Congratulations, Mr. King!

For more information on the Leacock Medal for Humour you can visit Leacock.ca.

2020 Governor General's Literary Awards winners

The winners of the 2020 Governor General's Literary Awards were announced today.

The seven English-language winners are:

• Fiction: Five Little Indians by Michelle Good
• Nonfiction: This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart by Madhur Anand
• Poetry: Norma Jeane Baker of Troy by Anne Carson
• Young people's literature — text: The King of Jam Sandwiches by Eric Walters
• Young people's literature — illustrated books: The Barnabus Project by The Fan Brothers
• Translation: If You Hear Me by Pascale Quiviger, translated by Lazer Lederhendler
• Drama: Kamloopa: An Indigenous Matriarch Story by Kim Senklip Harvey

Congratulations to all of them!

The 2020 prizes were delayed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The 2021 awards will be given out this fall. For more information on the Governor General's Literary Awards, please visit ggbooks.ca

June's Author of the Month: IVAN COYOTE

Ivan Coyote is the award-winning author of thirteen books, the creator of four short films, and they have released three albums that combine storytelling with music. They have spent decades on the road, telling stories around the world. For years, Ivan has kept a file of the most special communications received from readers and audience members — letters, Facebook messages, emails, soggy handwritten notes tucked under the windshield wiper of their truck after a gig. Then came Spring, 2020, and, like artists everywhere, Coyote was grounded by the pandemic, all their planned events cancelled. The energy of a live audience, a performer’s lifeblood, was suddenly gone. But with this loss came an opportunity for a different kind of connection. Those letters that had long piled up could finally begin to be answered.

Care Of combines the most powerful of these letters with Ivan’s responses, creating a body of correspondence of startling intimacy, breathtaking beauty, and heartbreaking honesty and openness. Taken together, they become an affirming and joyous reflection on many of the themes central to Coyote’s celebrated work — compassion and empathy, family fragility, non-binary and Trans identity, and the unending beauty of simply being alive, a giant love letter to the idea of human connection, and the power of truly listening to each other.