Jack Hodgins Founders’ Award for Fiction

2008 Winner

The University of Victoria, on behalf of The Malahat Review, is pleased to announce that this year’s recipient of the Jack Hodgins Founders’ Award for Fiction is Mark Anthony Jarman of Fredericton, for his short story “Night March in the Territory,” which appeared in The Malahat Review’s Spring 2007 issue. Jarman’s award-winning story was chosen for this prestigious award by Janice Kulyk Keefer.

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 just prior to the publication of The Malahat Review’s Spring issue.

Of Jarman’s story, Kulyk Keefer says “the quality of thought, force of language, and challenge posed by the subject matter were all outstanding.”

photo of Mark Anthony Jarman

Mark Anthony Jarman is the author of 19 Knives, New Orleans Is Sinking, and the travel book Ireland’s Eye. His hockey novel, Salvage King Ya!, is on Amazon.ca’s list of 50 Essential Canadian Books and is the number one book on Amazon’s list of best hockey fiction. Shortlisted for the O. Henry Prize and Best American Essays, he has won a Gold National Magazine Award in non-fiction, twice won the Maclean-Hunter Endowment Award, and has been included in The Journey Prize Anthology and Best Canadian Stories. He has published recently in Walrus, Canadian Geographic, Hobart, The Barcelona Review, Vrij Nederland, and writes reviews for The Toronto Globe and Mail. He is a graduate of The Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a Yaddo fellow, has taught at the University of Victoria, the Banff Centre for the Arts, and now teaches at the University of New Brunswick, where he is fiction editor of The Fiddlehead. His new collection of stories, My White Planet, will be published in 2008.

photo of Jack Hodgins
Jack Hodgins. Photo by Darren Stone, Times Colonist.

Janice Kulyk Keefer is the author of numerous works of fiction, poetry, criticism. and creative non-fiction, most recently the novel The Ladies' Lending Library. A multiple winner of National Magazine Awards and CBC Radio’s literary competition, she has twice been shortlisted for a Governor-General’s Award and was awarded the Marian Engel Award as well as the CAA Award for Poetry. She teaches at the University of Guelph and in the Guelph-Humber MFA Program in Creative Writing.

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 email The Malahat Review.

Previous Jack Hodgins Founders' Award Winners