The Koffler Centre of the Arts is thrilled to announce the Jury for 2021 Vine Awards for Canadian Jewish Literature!
The annual Vine Awards recognize works of fiction, history, non-fiction, poetry, and young adult/children’s literature with $10,000 prizes, bringing the best of contemporary Jewish writing to the Canadian public and supporting literary talent. Submissions for the 2021 awards – for books published in 2020 – have now closed. Winners will be announced in Fall 2021.
Zelda Abramson is Professor Emerita, Sociology Department Acadia University. The daughter of Holocaust survivors who settled in Montreal after the War, Zelda’s interest in reconstructing overlooked stories and voices led her to write The Montreal Shtetl: Making Home After the Holocaust (2020), co-authored with John Lynch. The book was shortlisted for the History prize at the 2020 Vine Awards.
Nathan Adler is author of Wrist (2016) and Ghost Lake (2020) and co-editor of Bawaajigan ~ Stories of Power (2019) a dream-themed anthology of Indigenous writers. Nathan is first-place winner of an Aboriginal Writing Challenge, and recipient of a Hnatyshyn Reveal award for literature. He is two-spirit, Jewish, Anishinaabe, and member of Lac Des Mille Lacs First Nation.
Naomi K. Lewis is a fiction and nonfiction writer, editor, and creative writing teacher in Calgary. She wrote the novel Cricket in a Fist (2008), the story collection I Know Who You Remind Of (2012), and co-edited the anthology Shy (2013). Her 2019 memoir, Tiny Lights for Travellers, won the Vine Award for Canadian Jewish Literature for Non-Fiction, Alberta’s Wilfrid Eggleston Award for Non-Fiction, the Pinsky Givon Prize for Non-Fiction, and was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction.
