Female Authors Sweep Ottawa Book Awards

Female authors made a clean sweep in all six categories of this year’s Ottawa Book Awards, which were handed out Wednesday.

The award for best English-language fiction went to writer-musician Conyer Clayton for her debut collection of poetry, We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite, while the French-language fiction award went to Monia Mazigh for Farida, the story of a Tunisian woman’s struggle in the country’s patriarchal system.

Suzanne Evans claimed the English non-fiction award for her book, The Taste of Longing: Ethel Mulvany and her Starving Prisoners of War Cookbook, a biography of the Canadian prisoner of war who rallied fellow inmates in Singapore’s Changi Jail to share recipes for imaginary feasts. After the war, Mulvany published a cookbook of those recipes to raise money to help surviving prisoners of war.

For the full article by Lynn Saxberg, go to the Ottawa Citizen Web site.

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