2022 Shortlist & Winner

Memoir, auto-fiction, documentary, dream—Céline Huyghebaert’s Le drap blanc, ably translated in English as Remnants by Aleshia Jensen (Book*hug Press), is all these and more—an original, probing, and deeply moving attempt to come to terms with the death of a parent and a family fractured by poverty, alcohol, and loss. Through overlapping and sometimes contradictory accounts, an image of the father emerges for writer and reader alike—one that can never be fixed and absolute but must always remain mutable, blurred, and incomplete.

Jaspreet Singh’s family history is marked by trauma, and therefore, also, by silence—for “trauma resists translation.” In My Mother, My Translator (Véhicule Press), he re-examines his parents’ and grandparents’ stories of partition, his own memories of anti-Sikh violence in the 1980s, and his move to Canada and decision to become a writer in a series of braided, looped, collaged, and imagistic vignettes that accrete and accumulate, diffuse and recombine. An unforgettable quest for an irretrievable past.

In Whitemud Walking, Matthew James Weigel (Coach House Books) unsettles the archive, deconstructs the myth of treaty, and restores the history of his family through a series of mournful, visionary, and sometimes darkly funny interventions using text, image, sound, silence, and the kinetic energy that arises from his perfectly calibrated juxtapositions, rearrangements and inventions. A powerful and moving book.