Andre Alexis wins Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize for ‘Fifteen Dogs’

TORONTO – Toronto author Andre Alexis has won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize for “Fifteen Dogs,” setting him up as a front-runner for next week’s Scotiabank Giller Prize.

The Trinidad native, who was raised in Ottawa, beat out four other authors to take the $25,000 award.

His story, in which 15 dogs are gifted by gods with the skills of human consciousness and language, is also a contender for next week’s $100,000 Giller.

This was the third time Alexis had been nominated for the Writers’ Trust fiction award, one of six prizes handed out in a ceremony in Toronto on Tuesday night.

Jury members Aislinn Hunter, Shani Mootoo, and Richard Wagamese called “Fifteen Dogs,” published by Coach House Books, “a beautifully written allegory for our times.”

“An original and vital work written by a master craftsman: philosophy given a perfect form,” they said in a statement.

Other prize recipients included Annabel Lyon of New Westminster, B.C., who took the $25,000 Writers’ Trust Engel/Findley Award, which goes to a mid-career writer for a body of work.

Lyon, who won the fiction prize in 2009 for “The Golden Mean,” said before the ceremony that she felt “completely unworthy, of course.”

“I can think of so many other people that absolutely deserve this,” said Lyon, who teaches in the creative writing program at the University of British Columbia and has three new books in the works — a young adult novel, an adult novel and a craft book with Nancy Lee.

“I also feel very much that it’s not my award, it’s everybody who’s helped me have the career that I have. That’s many, many people, ranging from the people in publishing, the editors and agents and publicists and that.

“But also my family on whose back this is all built, because they do the child care, they take care of me so that I can have my time alone in my room to do my crazy little thing and make my crazy little imaginary road.”

Richard Wagamese, an Ojibway author and reporter from Kamloops, B.C., took the $20,000 Matt Cohen Award: In Celebration of a Writing Life.

Karen Solie got the $25,000 Latner Writers’ Trust Poetry Prize, which goes to a poet in mid-­career for a body of work.

Jan Thornhill of Havelock, Ont., an author and illustrator of kids’ books about animals and nature, won the $20,000 Vicky Metcalf Award for Literature for Young People.

And Deirdre Dore of Nakusp, B.C., won the $10,000 Writers’ Trust/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize, which honours the best short story published by an emerging writer in a Canadian literary magazine.

Dore won the honour for “The Wise Baby,” about a philosophy student and an infant neighbour.