2011 ReLiT Award Winners - the best from independent publishing

The ReLit Awards, which honour the best from the world of independent publishing, have announced the 2011 winners.

The Short Story award goes to Ravenna Gets (M)
by Tony Burgess.

"From the author of Pontypool Changes Everything, Ravenna Gets is a new collection of “wheeled” stories that continue the author’s exploration of “apocalypse fiction.” In a single convulsion of homicide, the population of Ravenna tries to erase the population of Collingwood. The innocent, standing in their living rooms, cooking in their kitchens, and playing in their yards, are simply checked off by hunting rifles or crossed out by farmers’ tools. There is one thing missing, however, as the bodies fall from what might have been better stories, better novels, and it’s this: everything." - Publisher

The Poetry award goes to Sweet (M)
by Dani Couture.

"Sweet is a gravity-clutched leap into personal emergency and the turbulent landscape surrounding ambivalence, including what lives in that landscape — invited or not. Dani Couture’s second collection of poetry takes the traveller from the emerald ash-borer infested trees of Essex County, Ontario, to the frozen lakes of Alaska and to points in-between. Dogged by tree-snapping winds, garbage-hungry bears, global uncertainty and war movie prophecy, the heart bends toward greater and deeper persistence through the intimate and at times anxious metre of Couture’s new poems." - Publisher

The Novel award goes to Blood Relatives (M)
by Craig Francis Power.

"Blood Relatives tells the story of Charlie, a down-on-his-luck thirty-one year old office cleaner, whose life, since the death of his father, is out of control. Darkly comic in intent, at times hilarious, at other times unnerving, Blood Relatives creates an utterly believable fictional world that turns the conventions of the coming-of-age novel inside out."--Publisher.