OPL + IMPAC

This month's City Librarian's Monthly Report has a snippet about our IMPAC submissions. You might not know that...

"Every year for as long as the award has been given ([since] 1996), the Ottawa Public Library has participated by submitting 3 novels published in the previous year. One year we nominated Alistair MacLeod's Some Great Mischief, which won the IMPAC for 2001! Our reading committee includes David Staines of the University of Ottawa, Randall Ware, formerly of Library and Archives Canada, Linda Sherlow-Lowdon formerly of the OPL, and chief librarian of Kanata Public Library, as well as library staff from Collection Management and branches. We read, judge and nominate what we think will be of international calibre to compete for such a prestigious literary prize. OPL sent in our nominees for this year:

Galore by Michael Crummey...."vividly imagines life in Newfoundland’s early permanent fishing settlements established around the beginning of the 19th century. It is a poetic and powerful rendering of an intricate family saga and love story spanning two centuries, where the line between the everyday and the otherworldly is impossible to distinguish"

The Bishop's Man by Linden MacIntyre ......"is perhaps as close as we will get to eavesdropping on the private conversations we were never meant to hear among clergy or between clergy and "complainers". It is an unforgettable and complex character study of a deeply conflicted man at the precipice of his life. It poses the question can any act of contrition redeem our own complicity?"

The Disappeared by Kim Echlin...... "is a love story which penetrates to the chilly core of the Cambodian tragedy of the 1970's in a love story between a young Montrealer and a Cambodian foreign student to the rampages of the Khmer Rouge and evokes questions about our very human need to revisit the past.""