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This September has seen three of our authors and collaborators nominated for three of Canada's most prestigious literary prizes.

Rhonda Mullins has been nominated for a Governor General award for the translation of The Embalmer by Anne Rennée-Caillé. Rhonda has been a part of the Coach House family since 2012. Her translations from French have seen her receive the Governor General’s Award for the Translation for Jocelyne Saucier’s Twenty-One Cardinals, and her 2017 translation of Suzanne was a finalist in 2019’s CBC Canada Reads. In The Embalmer, A small-town embalmer's daughter lifts the shroud on the fascinating minutiae of dealing with the dead, as she picks the brain of her father for the most gruesome and thought-provoking secrets of his embalming career. Anne-Renée Caillé divides her time between Kingston and Montreal. She is writing her next book while working at Queen’s university. A regular contributor to Liberté magazine since 2012, she has published fiction and nonfiction in a variety of magazines and anthologies. The Embalmer is her first novel. 

André Alexis was long listed for a Giller prize for best fiction with his latest novel Days By Moonlight. André has been writing for Coach House since 2014, with the release of Pastoral, his first novel in a series of five. The Second, Fifteen Dogs, was the winner of the 2015 Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the 2015 Rogers Writers Trust Award. Days by Moonlight is the penultimate book in the quincunx, in which botanist Alfred Homer is invited on a road trip by his dead parents' friend Professor Morgan Bruno. Professor Bruno wants company as he tries to unearth the story of the mysterious and perhaps dead poet John Skennen. Days by Moonlight is a journey through an underworld that looks like southern Ontario, taken during the "hour of the wolf”.

Tess Liem has been short listed as a finalist for the A.M Klein award for poetry, from the Quebec Writers Federation Literary Award, with her debut collection, Obits. Tess is a queer writer living in Montreal, Tiotia:ke, the traditional territory of the Kanien’keh.:ka. Her writing has appeared in, amongst other publications, Plenitude, Room Magazine, PRISM, and Best Canadian Poetry 2018. Her essay ‘Rice Cracker’ won the Constance Rooke Creative Nonfiction Prize in 2015. Obits considers victims of mass deaths, fictional characters, and Tess’ own aunt, asking what does it mean to be an 'I' mourning a 'you' when both have been othered? Can poems mourn the unmourned?

Congratulations to all of our writers, and best of luck to Rhonda and Tess for the forthcoming announcements.