This new award celebrates SCS learners writing outstanding fiction.
The finalists of the inaugural University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies Pal Saqi Award for Fiction have been announced. Established by author and SCS learner Rajinderpal S. Pal, and named in honour of his father, the Pal Saqi Award for Fiction provides $2000 annually to a Creative Writing Certificate learner with the most outstanding final project. The award’s recipients are selected by a panel of Canadian publishing industry professionals.
This year’s Pal Saqi Award for Fiction finalists are:
Diana Catargiu was born and raised in Romania and moved to Canada in 2003. She lives in Mississauga, where she teaches at Sheridan College. In 2020, Diana was longlisted for the CBC Nonfiction Award, and in 2019, she won the $1000 Penguin Random House Student Award for Fiction. She was shortlisted for the same award in 2017 and 2018.
The short stories in Catargiu’s collection, Confiscated, are set in the bleak years of communist Romania or shortly after 1989, when communism collapsed. Despite being scarred by living under a totalitarian regime, the characters in these stories navigate life with grit and, often, with a sense of humour.
T.M.B. Park grew up in Saskatchewan and wrote her first short story at the age of 8 on a cutting edge electric typewriter. She happily pursued her U of T creative writing certificate while defending journalists and other creatives as a media and entertainment lawyer and travelling the world. She now balances motherhood and writing in rural Ontario.
She sums up her collection this way: "These stories mostly focus on youngish women who believe they are complicated but who actually take simple comfort in delusion as an antidote to solitude. They have familiar small town Canadian backgrounds but also a worldliness and appreciation for poetic gestures which informs the mini acts of rebellion they often engage in. They are not likeable or sensible, but I hope they are interesting."
Noa Raanan (she/her) is an Israeli Canadian writer. She has published short stories and nonfiction in Hebrew, English, and German. Her writing was displayed in Granta Hebrew Edition, Jewish Women of Words, Frankfurter Rundschau and Emerging Writers Reading Series. Currently, she is studying toward an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Guelph and writing a novel.
Set in the summer of 2005, Jerusalem Syndrome tells the story of a young Israeli woman who arrives in Jerusalem to study Literature and Philosophy and find love. Naomi possesses a romantic view of Jerusalem, which had emerged from reading well-known Israeli novels, but Jerusalem confronts her with an intensity she was not prepared to face.
Alison Stevenson’s stories have appeared in PRISM international, The New Quarterly, Prairie Fire, Pulp Literature and elsewhere, as finalists in the Alice Munro Festival, Penguin Random House Student Fiction, and Raven Contests, and on the CBC and TNQ/Hinchcliffe longlists. She attended the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies, the Humber writers’ school, and Iowa Writers’ Workshop summer workshop. She is completing a short story collection. Find her at alisonstevensonwriter.ca
In Groundwork we find characters on the cusp of change, remembering, loving, aspiring, grieving, searching, journeying. These stories span the Victorian era through the 1970s to the present and range from Ireland to London, Thunder Bay to Nova Scotia to Toronto, in worlds realistic and magical and... just weird.
This year’s jury is comprised of: Karen Brochu, Publisher, House of Anansi Press; Hilary Lo, Assistant Editor, Knopf Canada and Alchemy; and Leah Mol, Associate Editor, Park Row Books, Harper Collins Canada.
For more information about the Pal Saqi Award for Fiction, please visit the SCS CuriousU Blog.