Summer has been hot hot from coast to coast and we hope you have found time to curl up in the shade with a great book!
It’s never too early to jot fall book launches into your calendars and we hope you can join us for the following Winnipeg events at McNally Robinson on Grant:
October 11th – Parallel Prairies, edited by Darren Ridgley and Adam Petrash, will get you set to spook!
October 25th – More Abandoned Manitoba, Gordon Goldsborough’s much anticipated follow-up to the 2016 hit!
November 18th – Coop The Great launches his adventure! This middle grade book by Larry Verstraete will have you rooting for this down-and-out dachshund.
Father’s Day is coming and Great Plains has you covered! Share the image above on your social media pages and tell us a story about what make your dad (or the father figure in your life) special. Four books will be given to four winners*, with two helping to keep your #WpgWhiteout memories alive!
*Winners addresses must be in Canada.
Stuck In The Middle 2 by Bartley Kives and Bryan Scott
The Sign for Migrant Soul by Richard Cumyn
Golden Boys by Ty Dilello
The Hot Line by Geoff Kirbyson
Be sure to tag us in your posts (you can find us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook). We’ll announce the winner on June 11th.
More Great Plans news here!
Our authors have gotten some great radio play this week!
Curious about why Angie Abdou asks “why isn’t Thomas Trofimuk a household name?” Listen to her audio review of This Is All A Lie on CBC Alberta! Following Angie’s rave review, Daybreak Alberta hosted Thomas for an interview, which you can listen to here.
Anne Mahon has committed her life making a difference. Let’s Give A Damn interviewed her about her volunteer work, and how that led to her commitment to share the stories of people in marginalized communities in her books The Lucky Ones and Redemption. Get ready to be inspired and check it out.
We have dates scheduled for the launches of our Yellow Dog titles this spring!
April 12th – Anita Daher kicks things off with her novel, Forgetting How To Breathe.
April 29th – Get ready for espionage at the launch of Family of Spies by Jodi Carmichael.
May 11th – Colleen Nelson and Nancy Chappell-Pollack wrap the spring season with Pulse Point.
All of our Yellow Dog launches will take place in Winnipeg at McNally Robinson Booksellers in Grant Park. We hope to see you there!
Happy 2018!
We are thrilled to start the new year with a starred review in Quill & Quire for Thomas Trofimuk’s This Is All A Lie. Grab your copy of this exceptional magazine for Canadian literature, which calls Thomas’ novel “a powerful, dazzling accomplishment.”
This Is All A Lie has also been selected for The Complete NP99: The best books of 2017 by The National Post!
Looking back at 2017, we are thrilled to see three Great Plains non-fiction titles on the McNally Robinson Manitoba Bestsellers list. If you haven’t grabbed a copy of Stories Best Left Untold, Abandoned Manitoba or Stuck In The Middle 2 yet, be sure to catch up on these bestsellers in 2018!
We are proud to announce the launch of Yellow Dog, our latest imprint named in honour of our favourite #dogAtWork, Scout. You can read all about the imprint in our latest e-news. Interested in submitting? Be sure to review our guidelines.
While we’re jazzed about the Spring list – announcement coming soon! – we are also busy bees working away on our Fall titles. Be sure to catch these upcoming launches at McNally Robinson Booksellers:
October 26 – Anne Mahon’s Redemption illuminates the harsh realities of gang life.
November 15 – Stuck In The Middle 2 kicks off. Bartley Kives and Bryan Scott’s Stuck In The Middle was a smash hit in 2013.
November 22 – Who is the greatest Manitoba hockey player of all time? Get down to the launch of Golden Boys by Ty Dilello to find out!
Abandoned Manitoba by Gordon Goldsborough has surpassed 5,000 copies sold!
Since its launch in October of 2016, Abandoned Manitoba has flown off store shelves. Here at Great Plains, we have hit the reprint button three times to ensure enough stock was available to retailers. Congratulations to Gordon Goldsborough on being the fastest Great Plains author to reach Canadian Bestseller standing!
Congratulations to Katherine Koller and Natasha Deen, who have both made the Alberta Readers’ Choice Awards shortlist. Natasha Deen’s Gatekeeper is the second book in her Guardian series. Watch for the final book, Game’s End, this fall! Art Lessons by Katherine Koller is a crossover fiction title, appropriate for teenage audiences as well as adults. Art Lessons is a novel about art and growing up on the outside.
Voting opens in July!
We are pleased to announce Lyse Champagne’s The Light That Remains has been shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award!
The Jury had this to say about Lyse’s exceptional collection:
Through the brutal lens of war, the stories in The Light that Remains span the twentieth century and travel the globe. Readers are caught up in the lives of innocent people in Armenia, the Ukraine, Hong Kong, France, Cambodia, and Rwanda, whose lives are irrevocably changed by the harrowing cruelties of war. With clear, elegant prose and a compassionate voice, Lyse Champagne explores loss, love, kindness, hope, despair, the need to survive. In so doing, she forces into the reader’s heart a deeper understanding of the anguish and strength that resides in the human spirit when worlds are shattered beyond recognition.
Congratulations to all of the nominees!
We are gearing up for our final releases of the Spring 2017 season!
On May 11th Byron Rempel will visit Winnipeg to launch The Bodice Ripper. The novel follows McGill professor Anna Hill as she gives up on a romance of her own, and fashions a harlequin of her own set in Medieval Spain. But will a visiting Parisian professor prove to her that romance is history?
Politicos, news buffs and … comedy fans (?) will want to catch Gord Mackintosh at his launch of Stories Best Left Untold: Tales of a Manitoba legislator at McNally Robinson on May 23rd. Gord’s many years in public life have left him with many tales to tell indeed!
The Manitoba Book Awards have announced this year’s shortlist, and we are delighted to see Great Plains authors on the list!
Gordon Goldsborough’s Abandoned Manitoba is up for the Isbister Award for Non-Fiction, the Manuela Dias Book Design Award for General Illustration and the Mary Scorer Award for Best Book by a Manitoba Publisher.
Her Darling Boy by Tom Goodman is up for the Manuela Dias Book Design Award for cover design and we are thrilled to see Tom recognized in the Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best First Book category.
Rounding out our nominations is The Shadow Over Portage and Main, edited by Keith Cadieux and Dustin Geeraert, which is up for the Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award. Great to see all of the Weird writers recognized for their creepy take on Winnipeg.
Congratulations to all of the nominees! For details on the awards, visit the Manitoba Writers’ Guild event page.
Congratulations to Richard Van Camp and all of the ReLit Awards Shortlist nominees. We are thrilled to see Night Moves on this distinguished list!
Seasons greetings and all the best in 2017!
Congratulations to Natasha Deen – Gatekeeper has been selected as a Best Book by the Canadian Children’s Book Centre! Pick up the Fall 2016 edition of the magazine for full details.
Congratulations to Tyler Enfield – Madder Carmine has won the High Plains Book Award for Fiction! From the judges:
“Madder Carmine is a masterpiece… Enfield’s fever dream of a classical quest is dizzying, poetic and original… a major work that deserves to be celebrated.”
We also received word this morning that Madder Carmine, as well as Natasha Deen’s Gatekeeper, have won Silver medals at the Moonbeam Book Awards. An excellent start to the fall season!
We were saddened to hear about the passing of the great W.P. Kinsella this weekend. Enfield & Wizenty is proud to have published Mr. Kinsella’s final manuscript, Butterfly Winter. Godspeed, sir.
The Thin Air International Writer’s Festival takes place in Winnipeg from September 23 to October 1 and we’ve got a collection of Great Plains writers taking part!
Weird Winnipeg, September 23 at 9 – Jonathan Ball and Daria Patrie from The Shadows Over Portage And Main will give you the jitters.
Gala: Celebrating Manitoba, September 24 at 7:30 – Carolyn Gray is part of this outstanding line-up of Manitoba writers!
Voices from Oodena, September 25 at 7 – Leonard Flett joins fellow Manitoba writers in this traditional gathering place at The Forks.
Brandon University, September 26 – Richard Van Camp will be in Brandon to deliver a workshop on Designing Unforgettable Characters, as well as reading from The Lesser Blessed on the book’s 20th anniversary.
We hope to see you at the festival this year!
Great Plains Press acknowledges we are located on original lands of Anishinaabeg, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota, and Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Métis Nation.
Great Plains Press gratefully acknowledges the financial support provided for its publishing program by the Government of Canada; the Canada Council for the Arts; as well as the the Manitoba Department of Sport, Culture and Heritage; and the Manitoba Arts Council.
SALES REPRESENTATION
Great Plains Press acknowledges we are located on original lands of Anishinaabeg, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota, and Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Métis Nation.