Tomorrow night at Conexus Arts Centre the 18th annual Saskatchewan Book Awards will be held. Fourteen categories are up for grabs. You can find the shortlist of nominees here. If you’ll notice, former prairie dog dining columnist Dave Margoshes is up for both Book of the Year and the Poetry Awards for his book Dimensions of an Orchard (Black Moss Press). So congrats to him.
Guest speaker at the SBA gala will be novelist Steven Galloway (pictured). Currently writer-in-residence at UBC, he’s authored three books: Finnie Walsh, Ascension and The Cellist of Sarajevo. I’m not familiar with the first two titles, but when the third was published in 2008 it aroused a bit of controversy when a cellist in Sarajevo who actually went out into the street and played for 22 days straight while his city was under seige in the mid-90s Bosnian War to honour people killed during bombing objected to Galloway using his heroic story as inspiration for a novel set during the seige.
Things get going at 5 p.m. Tix are $70.