2007 Winner
The University of Victoria, on behalf of The Malahat Review, is pleased to announce the establishment and first recipient of the Jack Hodgins Founders’ Award for Fiction.
Established in honour of the celebrated Victoria novelist’s contribution to Canadian letters and to the University of Victoria, the Jack Hodgins Founders’ Award for Fiction recognizes the excellence of The Malahat Review’s contributors by awarding a prize of $1000 to the author of the best short story or novella to have appeared in the magazine’s quarterly issues during the previous calendar year. The winner, to be chosen by an outside judge, will be announced annually prior to the publication of The Malahat Review’s Spring issue. The judge of the inaugural award is Jack Hodgins himself.
“It is an honour,” says John Barton, editor of The Malahat Review, “for the magazine to have the opportunity to give out an award in Jack Hodgins’s name. He is one of Canada’s most respected novelists, and his accomplishments continue to inspire. It is a great pleasure for me to see his achievement as a writer of enduring importance and his years as a professor of writing at the University of Victoria recognized in this manner. Both will be celebrated each time the winner of the Jack Hodgins Founders’ Award is announced in the years ahead.”
The winner of the inaugural Jack Hodgins Award for Fiction is Anne Sanow of Cambridge, Massachusetts, for “Rub-al Khali,” which appeared in The Malahat Review’s Winter 2006 issue.
Set in Riyadh, Sanow’s award-wining story is a subtle drama narrated by a family matriarch about the marital problems her son is having with his two wives, one Saudi, the other American, set against the experience of several generations of her family who have lived through their country’s evolution from the tent to the highrise.
Of Sanow’s story, Jack Hodgins said:
“Anne Sanow has created such a complete, convincing, and complex world—a major accomplishment in a short story. While the ‘exoticism’ of the place and people were obviously important to my reading, I do not believe this swayed me. The writer's empathy for three vivid characters at odds with one another and with their world is powerful enough to become almost immediately an important part of the reader's experience. And, amazingly, so much was accomplished in a prose style that does not draw attention to itself. Sanow’s characters—each individual as well as the family as a group—became so convincingly real to me that I feel I know them more intimately than I had any right to expect.”
Anne Sanow is the recipient of two fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Her Saudi stories have been published or are forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, Other Voices, and Crab Orchard Review, and have garnered a Pushcart Special Mention and an additional nomination. Currently teaching writing at Montserrat College of Art and Lesley University, she is working on a novel.
Jack Hodgins was born in Comox on Vancouver Island in 1938, and raised in the logging community of Merville. After graduating from the University of British Columbia, he moved to Nanaimo, where he taught high school English until 1979. He has been a writer-in-residence at Simon Fraser University and the University of Ottawa, and taught fiction in the Department of Writing, University of Victoria, from 1983 to 2004. His first collection of stories, Spit Delaney’s Island (1976) established him as a presence in Canadian writing, bringing his distinctive perspective on Vancouver Island to readers in book after book. His third, The Resurrection of Joseph Bourne (1979), won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction in 1980. His other books include The Honorary Patron (1987), Innocent Cities (1990), A Passion for Narrative: A Guide for Writing Fiction (1993), The Macken Charm (1995), Broken Ground (1998), and Damage Done By the Storm (2004). He is a recipient of the Eaton’s BC Book Award, the Gibson’s First Novel Award, the Commonwealth Literature Prize, the Canada-Australia Prize, the Terasen Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence.
For more information about the Jack Hodgins Founders’ Award for Fiction and how you may support it through a donation, please contact: Karen Whyte at 250-721-6696 or by email at kwhyte@uvic.ca.
Previous Jack Hodgins Founders' Award Winners
- 2009
- 2008
- 2007
