CNFC Creative Nonfiction Collective

CNFC Readers’ Choice Awards

At this year’s conference in Banff, we’ll be hosting the fourth annual Creative Nonfiction Collective’s Readers’ Choice Awards. We hope this event will be a fun, festive, informal opportunity to share some of our favourite reading moments of the last two years, and celebrate the work of fellow Canadian authors of creative nonfiction.

Eligibility:

Eligibility for this award is based on the following criteria:

- The author must be a Canadian writer of creative nonfiction.
- The author cannot be a member of the CNFC board (e.g., Myrna Kostash, Cathy Ostlere, Claire Festel, Myrl Coulter, Alisa Gordaneer, Darlene Chrapko, James Romanow).
- The author is preferably a writer who didn’t win a nonfiction major book award. (We’re looking to acknowledge the otherwise unacknowledged.)
- The work can be an excerpt of excellent creative nonfiction writing from a book, article or essay published in any medium during the past two years.

Selection Process (limited to Conference Attendees):

- Any CNFC member can nominate an author who meets the Eligibility criteria above.
- To submit a nomination, send the author’s name and the title of the book or essay to CNFCreaderschoiceawards@gmail.com. (Please do not send nominations to the Listserv.) If you can’t attend the conference, you will need to submit a short excerpt to be read at the awards ceremony.
- The first 10 nominations received will form the short list—so send your choices ASAP!
- Conference attendees whose nominees make this short list will be notified and should come to Banff prepared to give a brief (less than a minute) introduction to the author, the book or other publication, explain why you chose the particular passage, and then read the selected excerpt (two minutes maximum) to our gathering.
- Feel free to suggest a witty title for the award you think your writer deserves (e.g., Most Memorable Memoir, The Putting the ‘Literary’ in Literary Journalism Award, Metaphor of the Year, etc.).

How It Works

-  On the evening of Saturday, April 27th, we’ll pass out ballots to our attending members before the event begins.
- Conference attendees will vote on for their favourite writer or passage of the evening.
- We will tabulate results and bestow a “Best in Show” award upon the nominee with the most votes—and raise another glass in her or his honour!
- After the conference, all the nominees and the Readers Choice winner (as well as some media outlets) will be contacted and apprised of these ceremonial awards (who wouldn’t love to hear that their words had been publicly celebrated at a gathering of writers?) and we’ll post names and titles of the writers on our website.

Questions

-  Feel free to send your questions to the Contact link on this website.

Past Winners:

2012: For her essay, “Threshold,” Jane Silcott took home the 2012 Readers’ Choice Award from the Vancouver Conference. Other nominees for 2012 included Molly Peacock’s “The Paper Garden”; Joel Yanofsky’s Bad Animals; Betty Jane Hegerat’s The Boy; Alice Major’s Intersecting Sets: A Poet Looks at Science and Dorothy Woodend’s essay “Movies and Memory.”

2011: The 2011 Reader’s Choice winner was Eve Joseph for “Intimate Strangers” (published in The Malahat Review). Other nominees were Aylelet Tsbari for “Warplanes” (in Prism) and Charles Foran for Mordecai.

Prior Years:

Previous winners of the CNFC Readers’ Choice Award include Theresa Kishkan and Sue Olding.