Lawrence Hill, for his historical novel The Book of Negroes, the Commonwealth Literary Prize. Larry was missed at the start of the Writers' Union AGM in Toronto yesterday, but we hear he's just back from the Commonwealth Prize ceremonies in South Africa and off to the Calabash Literary Festival (specializing in literature of the African diaspora) in Jamaica. Interesting: the American edition of The Book of Negroes will be called Somebody Knows My Name. And to Guy Vanderhaege, novelist recently most noted for his two novels of western history, The Englishman's Boy and The Last Crossing, a Trudeau fellowship.
On the academic side, Angus McLaren, of the University of Victoria, BC, historian of sexuality and mores, gets a Killam Fellowship. And there's one for legal historian Constance Backhouse of the University of Ottawa Law School, too.
