Since 1993, the province has held the Saskatchewan Book Awards (SBA) to highlight the great writers and publishers living beneath these blue skies.
“People say that Manitoba is full of musicians and Saskatchewan is full of writers. I don't know if that's true but I do know there are a lot of writers who live in Saskatchewan and are very good,” said Melanie Schnell, winner of the First Book Award and Regina Award in the 2013 SBA.
Joanne Skidmore, the Awards chair, said the organization had a simple beginning.
“(It started) at a time when people who were connected to writing, publishing, and libraries saw that writers from Saskatchewan were getting a lot of attention across the country but not any focused attention in the province,” she said.
Twenty-one years after the very first award ceremony, when there were only four awards to win, the residents of Saskatchewan eagerly await the announcement of the short list. On Feb. 13, the public can gather in the common area of Campion College at 3 p.m. to hear who the judges have chosen to short list for the 13 available awards.
“If your book is submitted and it is short-listed that means something,” said Skidmore. “If you go to a different publisher with a new book it immediately puts the manuscript in a different category.”
In each award category, there are three judges, totaling 39 judges from across Canada. The judges receive the entries in November and spend roughly two months reading before discussing their ideas for a short list (and winner) over conference calls.
If the judges of a category feel there isn’t a book that deserves to win, the award is not given out.
“Judges always have the prerogative to say, ‘Nope, not good enough,’” said Skidmore.
For these reasons, writer Schnell feels pretty fantastic for winning not just one, but two, awards. She was also nominated for the fiction award and Book of the Year. While such news was thrilling, Schnell said it was also nerve-wracking.
“Everyone said I must be so excited. It wasn't excitement, it was pure nerves because, ‘Oh my gosh, I'm nominated for four (awards), let me at least win one!’”
Schnell said she has written since she was a little girl, although she spent much of her young life travelling and living a bohemian lifetstyle, avoiding a writing career entirely. She fully embraced the idea of writing for a living when she was in her 30s.
“All those things were me avoiding writing because writing is hard. You have to be disciplined. It's isolating. You go into deep, dark places,” she explained.
Her first novel While the Sun is Above Us certainly goes into dark places. Through two female narrators, Schnell tells the story of two women, one in war-torn Sudan and the other from a non-profit organization, who meet just once and spend the rest of the story narrating their experiences to each other.
“They're doing it as a desperate attempt to connect to each other and try to justify what happened at the meeting,” said Schnell.
Since winning the awards, Schnell has had a lot of requests to do presentations, readings, and interviews. She mentioned a few people are working on a screen play of the novel with the potential of it being made into a film.
For her, the book awards helped put her work on a path to success.
