Ukrainian Canadian Themes Creatively Presented in Kobzar Literary Award 2010 Shortlist

By Oksana Zakydalsky

The third Kobzar Literary Award ceremony will take place at the Palais Royale in Toronto, on March 4, 2010. The shortlist of books nominated for the award was announced in the Globe & Mail Weekend Books Section on November 14. The award winner will be selected by the following four adjudicators: Sandra Birdsell, author of eight books, among them the bestselling novel The Russlander; Janice Kulyk Keefer, Kobzar Literary Award winner and author of 14 books, including poetry, fiction, memoir and literary criticism; Kerri Sakamoto, writer of novels, screenplays and essays on visual art and winner of the Japan Canada Literary Prize; and Richard Scrimger, who has published 14 books for adults and children.

The Kobzar Literary Award, presented biennially, is a $25,000 prize that recognizes a Canadian writer who best presents a Ukrainian Canadian theme with literary merit through poetry, drama, fiction, non-fiction or young people’s literature. The Award was launched by the Ukrainian Canadian Foundation of Taras Shevchenko in 2003, and so far has been awarded twice. The first award in 2006 was shared by Laura Langston, author of the novel Lesia’s Dream, and Danny Schur, composer and producer of Strike! The Musical. The second award in 2008 went to Janice Kulyk Keefer for her novel The Ladies Lending Library.

Dr. Christine Turkewych, Program Director, reports that a public relations campaign has been initiated to bring the Kobzar Literary Award shortlist to greater attention among the Canadian reading public. Currently, all four Kobzar short listed titles are available on www.amazon.com, and bookstores in Edmonton, Winnipeg and Toronto are engaged in displaying the nominated books. A list of participating bookstores can be found on the website

www.kobzarliteraryaward.com.

Hockey, ethics, religious history and the “search for identity” represent the themes of the books found on the shortlist while theauthors’ activity and work cover the breadth of Canada – from Newfoundland to British Columbia, with Manitoba and Saskatchewan in between.

The following book titles have been short listed and nominated for the 2010 Kobzar Literary Award.

Night Work

Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems by Randall Maggs, a poet and teacher at Memorial University in Corner Brook, Newfoundland, focuses on the life and times of Terry Sawchuk, the great goaltender from the original six-team National Hockey League. It is a biography in poems - some are prose-like, included to provide information, others are monologues in Sawchuk’s own voice – all are built into a narrative long poem. 

Sawchuk has been called the most troubled figure in the history of the national game. His tumultuous 21 season hockey career (1949-1970) took place when the unmasked goaltender faced serious physical hazards. He was a star, voted the top goalie of all time, who had 103 career shutouts – a record which still stands. Yet off the ice, he suffered from untreated depression and died at 40 years of age after a scuffle with a teammate. He grew up in a Ukrainian immigrant household, with a “faraway father” and a mother, as Maggs writes, who was the “only one in the world who scared him”. It seems to have been an experience that formed a dark and unpredictable character.

Zo

The novel Zo is by author Murray Andrew Pura who was born and raised in Winnipeg, and currently lives in southwestern Alberta.  He has been a prolific writer, speaker and researcher in the areas of philosophy, theology and ethics.

 The story is centered on the Chornavka Family, Ukrainian immigrants to Western Canada just before World War I. The main characters are Andrew Chornavka and his younger sister Zoya. The novel begins in the present with Andrew - an elderly monastic in a monastery, where he has taken a vow of silence and found peace, apparently escaping from demons which had invaded his life. But his idyllic existence is interrupted when an entourage from The Vatican arrives to question him about his sister Zoya who has become a candidate for beatification.

Andrew is forced to go back into his family’s painful history as he relates various incidents in Zoya’s life. He describes the hatred directed against his family because they had come from Galicia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire; the internment of an uncle as an enemy alien; the racism endured by his family because they were Slavs, a hatred which evolves into violence when Andrew’s father goes into business with a Jew. Living with constant tension, seeing only hatred around them, the family seeks refuge in the socialist movement. Motivated by idealism born of their socialist beliefs, Andrew and his other sister Yuzia (with her husband and son) decide to go to back to Ukraine to help in the Soviet farm collectivization drive, a decision that leads to tragedy.

The précis-review of the remaining two book titles short listed for the 2010 Kobzar Literary Award, Redemption and Ritual by Paul Laverdure and God of Missed Connections by Elizabeth Bachinsky, will appear in the next New Pathway, Issue 3, Jan. 21, 2010