Kobzar Literary Award 2008

By Oksana Zakydalsky

TORONTO - The Kobzar Literary Award 2008 Ceremony and Dinner, the second presentation of the biennial Shevchenko Foundation $25,000 prize, will take place on March 6^th, 2008, at the Palais Royale Ballroom in Toronto. Four jurors are poring over the four books selected for the shortlist, which was made up from 18 eligible works submitted for this year’s award. This is an 80% increase in the number of submissions from the 2006 Award, showing that there is a significant number of writers in Canada dealing with Ukrainian Canadian themes.

On the shortlist there is one work of fiction: Janice Kulyk Keefer’s The Ladies Lending Library (Harper Collins, 2007) in which the critically acclaimed and prize winning author writes about a group of women at Kalyna Beach, in the summer of 1963, preparing for their annual end-of-season party. With their husbands away in the city all week, the women’s days are ruled by the predictable rhythms of children and chores, lightened by the “racy” books they trade amongst themselves and by their Friday afternoon gatherings for gin and gossip. But this summer, everything will change for the girls and women of Kalyna Beach as they exchange their innocence for a new understanding of the possibilities open to them all.

Two works of non-fiction made the shortlist: Roman Fodchuk’s Zhorna: Material Culture of the Ukrainian Pioneers (University of Calgary Press, 2006) and Lisa Grekul’s Leaving Shadows: Literature in English by Canada’s Ukrainians (University of Alberta Press, 2005)

Roman Fodchuk works as a planning and landscape design professional for national historic parks and national parks across Canada, and his firm initiated the planning and design for the Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village in Alberta. Zhorna – the Ukrainian word for the stone mill that was used to grind grain into flour – stands as a symbol of the patience, strength and tenacity that the pioneers required to transform rough grains into fine flour and the characteristics with which they approached their life and work. The book tells the story of a resourceful people with a strong sense of practical aesthetics and a close relationship to the earth and nature. The author includes illustrations and fine line drawings of tools, clothing, buildings and interiors as well vignettes of his own early life on a pioneer homestead.

Lisa Grekul, teaches Canadian Literature at the University of British Columbia, and her first book, Kalyna’s Song, was short listed for the Amazon.ca/Books in Canada Best First Book Award and the inaugural 2006 Kobzar Literary Award. In Leaving Shadows, Ms Grekul has produced the first book-length monograph on English Ukrainian writing and set out to offer fresher images of Ukrainian culture in Canada than the “giant pysanka (Easter Egg) of Vegreville” by providing substantive analyses of authors such as Myrna Kostash, Andrew Suknaski, George Ryga, Janice Kulyk Keefer, Vera Lysenko and Maara Haas.

The fourth book, depending on the bookstore, can be found either under “Memoirs” or under “Cooking”, is Marusya Bociurkiw’s Comfort Food for Breakups: Memoir of a Hungry Girl (Arsenal Pulp Press, Vancouver 2007). Marusya Bociurkiw is a filmmaker and author and currently teaches film and media studies in Toronto. Her book is composed of intimate vignettes, where food nourishes, comforts and heals. Food becomes her salvation and a way to engage with the world. Thoughtful, moving and passionate, Comfort Food for Breakups muses upon the ways in which food intersects with a nexus of hungers for intimacy and for home.

The jury who will choose the award winner includes: Saskatchewan-born author and playwright Sharon Butala, Latvian-born Modris Eksteins – author, historian and professor at the University of Toronto; children’s writer, broadcast journalist and winner of the 2006 Kobzar Literary Award Laura Langston; and editor, author and literary critic John Metcalf.

With this second presentation of the Kobzar Literary Award, as well as the scholarship and faculty position inaugurated in 2007 at the Humber School for Writers’ Summer Workshop, the  Ukrainian Canadian Taras Shevchenko Foundation is fulfilling its vision to create opportunities for all Canadian writers to explore Ukrainian Canadian themes that are relevant to Canadians. To ensure wider coverage of the Award, a one-third page advertisement was featured twice in the “Books Section” of The Globe and Mail – the most recent in the February 2 Weekend Globe and Mail Issue.

Additional information on the Kobzar Literary Award as well as on the 2008 Award Ceremony and Dinner can be found on www.kobzarliteraryaward.com