6 June 2007
Sean Johnston & K.I. Press Shortlisted for ReLit Awards

Gaspereau Press is pleased to announce that Sean Johnston’s novel All This Town Remembers and K.I. Press’s poetry collection Types of Canadian Women, Volume II have been shortlisted for this year’s ReLit Awards. There are nine finalists in each of three categories – novel, short fiction and poetry. The winners will be announced in early July and a bonfire celebration will be held later this summer in Newfoundland. The ReLit awards were founded in 2000 as an alternative to big-money prizes. The awards are open to books published by independent Canadian literary publishers. For more information about the awards and for a complete list of this year’s finalists, please visit http://therelitawards.blogspot.com

BACKGROUND
All This Town Remembers: A small town in Saskatchewan suffers a tragedy when Joey Fallow, star of the high school’s hockey team, is killed in a bus crash. Twenty years later, when the CBC comes to town to make a movie about the event, it becomes clear that many residents haven’t moved on and that many don’t want to. With sharp observations about small-town life and the subtleties of social interactions, Sean Johnston’s debut novel is an understated, startlingly resonant portrait of a man and a town.

Types of Canadian Women, Volume II: In 1903, a biographical album of Canadian women was published. The publishers envisioned a second volume, but when after a century none was forthcoming, poet K.I. Press decided to write the one she wished had been. Press’s send-up Volume II is a collection of prose and poetry, illustrated with archival photographs. Press illuminates her portraits of farming, pioneering, politics, painting, athletics, childbirth, religion, romance and psychosis with fantastical and symbolic elements to create a series of narratives that slip almost imperceptibly from reality into imagination and back again.

Gaspereau Press is a literary publisher and printer based in Kentville, Nova Scotia. The press is committed to literature and the book arts, incorporating a range of modern and antique forms of printing and binding to create books that are distinctive in manufacture and design. Its publications have won numerous awards, including the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Atlantic Poetry Prize, the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry, the Alberta Book Award for fiction, and numerous Alcuin Awards for excellence in book design.

For more information contact
Beth Crosby at Gaspereau Press
47 Church Avenue, Kentville, NS, B4N 2M7
902-678-6002, info@gaspereau.com