SPC Prof - Allan Casey Short-listed for Award
Congratulations to Allan Casey whose novel, Lakeland: Journeys into the Soul of Canada, on September 13, was short-listed for the Edna Staebler Award for Literary non-fiction handed out by Wilfred Laurier University. The $10,000 award encourages and recognizes Canadian writers for a first or second work of creative non-fiction that includes a Canadian locale and/or significance.
The jurors said the books shortlisted for this year's award distinguish themselves not only through the understanding that the authors show for their subjects, but also by their humour and their respect for non-fiction books as vehicles driven by passionate attention to a subject that has been misunderstood or neglected. Though the authors direct that attention towards three very different subjects, all of the shortlisted books exhibit an admirable social consciousness mixed with a poetic sense of story.
Allan Casey plumbs Canada's lakes as both physical and metaphorical wellsprings of Canadian identity. Writing in defiance of all boundaries between science writing, reportage and lyrical autoethnography, he takes us out onto the waters for a better look back at the shore. Ultimately, Casey not only revelas how Canada's millions of lakes form a watery connective tissue that holds this nation together, but also how close we are to choking our lakes with our increasingly affluent embrace. At once intimate and fact-driven, political and poetic, Lakeland is environmental writing at its best: it makes you want to be a part of the solution.
For more information on the 2010 Edna Staebler Awards click here.
Allan Casey teaches Creative Non-fiction at St. Peter's College. He will be reading from his novel Lakeland: Journeys into the Soul of Canada on November 25. More information to come!
