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1st Book Competition
Entry Requirements | Entry Form | Judges Biography | About Anvil Press
Join The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University in celebrating our tenth anniversary by entering our 1st Book Competition. We’re looking for original, book-length manuscripts in creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry (* note important details below), written in English by emerging Canadian** writers who have not previously published a book. The winners and short lists will be announced in the fall of 2010. The winning manuscripts in each genre will be published by Vancouver’s Anvil Press in 2011.
Entry Requirements
- There is a $55 entry fee per submission. Make cheques payable to Simon Fraser University. You may also include an additional $10 (special contest rate) for a one-year subscription to subTerrain Magazine.
- Submissions are restricted to complete and unpublished*** manuscripts, of no more than 90,000 words for creative nonfiction as well as for fiction, or 100 pages for poetry. Submissions must be clean, legible, and typed double-space (or 1 and ½ space for poetry) on 8½” x 11” white paper, in either 12 point Times Roman or Courier. Number each page and include a table of contents if needed. Each submission must include two copies of your manuscript (hard copy only — no faxed or emailed submissions will be accepted).
- Your name must not appear on your manuscript. Each submission must include a completed 1st Book Competition Entry Form which can be found on this page after December 15th, 2009.
- All manuscripts will be shredded after judging — they will not be returned. For acknowledgment your manuscript has been received, enclose a self-addressed, stamped postcard. Winners (one in each category) will be announced in the fall of 2010.
- Submissions will be judged anonymously and upon merit alone. The judges’ decisions are final. Information on our judges can be found on this page after December 15th, 2009.
- A manuscript that has undergone developmental work with the judge in your genre category is ineligible.
- Before mailing your submission, double-check all requirements listed above as any oversight may result in disqualification, without refund.
DEADLINE FOR ENTRIES
Manuscripts must be postmarked no later than May 31, 2010.
No late entries will be read.
Please direct questions not addressed above to John Mavin, our 1st Book Competition Coordinator, at 1stbook@sfu.ca. For questions about The Writer’s Studio, please email Betsy Warland, Program Director, The Writer’s Studio.
Send your submissions to:
1st Book Competition
c/o Kim Hockey, Course Clerk,
The Writing and Publishing Program,
Simon Fraser University at Harbour Centre
515 West Hastings Street
Vancouver, British Columbia V6B 5K3
The Fine Print
* Creative nonfiction includes all forms of creative nonfiction written with literary sensibilities such as personal essays, memoir, travel writing, philosophy, biography, literary journalism, and personal narrative collections. Fiction submissions can be a novel, a novella, or a collection of short fiction. Poetry includes a collection of poems or a book-length poem, a lyric prose narrative, mixed or cross-genre narratives, transcribed spoken word, and experimental poetry.
** Canadian citizens living in Canada or abroad, or landed immigrants in Canada only.
*** At least 75% of your submission must be unpublished (including Internet publication), and no part can be submitted or accepted elsewhere for publication or broadcast, nor entered simultaneously in any other contest or competition.
Best of luck entering our competition and with your writing projects!
Download Entry Form
Click here to download the PDF form. 
Judges’ Biographies
Mark Anthony Jarman is the author of 19 Knives, New Orleans Is Sinking, Dancing Nightly in the Tavern, and the travel book Ireland’s Eye. His 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.
He has been short-listed for the O. Henry Prize and Best American Essays, he won a Gold National Magazine Award in nonfiction, has twice won the Maclean-Hunter Endowment Award, won the Jack Hodgins Fiction Prize, 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 reviews for The Globe & 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 newest collection of stories, My White Planet, was published in 2008.
Karen Connelly is the author of nine books of best-selling nonfiction, fiction, and poetry, the most recent being Burmese Lessons, a love story, a memoir about her experiences in Burma and on the Thai-Burma border.,She has won the Pat Lowther Award for her poetry, the Governor General’s Award for her non-fiction, and Britain’s Orange Broadband Prize for New Fiction for her first novel The Lizard Cage. Published in 2005, The Lizard Cage was compared in the New York Times Book Review to the works of Orwell, Solzhenitsyn, and Mandela, and hailed in the Globe and Mail as “one of the best modern Canadian novels.”
Her other books include Grace and Poison, One Room in a Castle, This Brighter Prison, The Disorder of Love, and The Small Words in My Body. Married with a young child, she divides her time between a home in rural Greece and a home in Toronto.
Gregory Scofield is one of Canada’s leading Aboriginal writers whose five collections of poetry have earned him both a national and international audience. He is known for his unique and dynamic reading style that blends oral storytelling, song, spoken word and the Cree language. His maternal ancestry can be traced back to the fur trade and to the Metis community of Kinosota, Manitoba, which was established in 1828 by the Hudson’s Bay Company. His paternal ancestry is Jewish, Polish and German that is reflective of the immigrant experience to Canada at the turn of the century. His poetry and memoir, Thunder Through My Veins (HarperCollins, 1999) is taught at numerous universities and colleges throughout Canada and the U.S., and his work has appeared in many anthologies. He was the subject of a feature length documentary, Singing Home The Bones: A Poet Becomes Himself (The Maystreet Group, 2007) that aired on CHUM TV, BRAVO!, APTN, and the Saskatchewan Television Network. He has served as Writer-in-Residence at the University of Manitoba and Memorial University of Newfoundland.
His latest collection, Kipocihkan: Poems New & Selected (Nightwood Editions) and the republication of I Knew Two Metis Women, along with the Companion CD (Gabriel Dumont Institute) will be released in Spring 2009. As well, his third collection of poetry, Love Medicine and One Song will be re-released by Kegedonce Press in 2009. He currently lives in Maple Ridge, B.C.
Anvil Press
Anvil Press was founded by Brian Kaufman in 1988 to publish the literary magazine subTerrain, now operating as a non-profit literary journal, published by the Subterrain Literary Collective Society. In 1991, Anvil released its first literary title, setting the tenor of its mandate to publish eclectic, daring literary work in all genres.
Over the years, Anvil Press has become firmly planted in the Canadian literary publishing scene, and is currently an active member of the Association of Canadian Publishers, the Association of Book Publishers of British Columbia, and the Literary Press Group of Canada.
To date, with just under 100 books in print, we have received numerous and significant accolades for our titles: most recently, City of Vancouver Book Award Finalist for At Home with History, two ReLit Award Finalists, i cut my finger (poetry) and Black Rabbit (stories); Finalist for the George Ryga Award for Social Awareness for Cusp/detritus; Giller Prize nomination for Stolen; two Alcuin Award citations for Signs of the Times (poetry by Vancouver Downtown Eastside activist Bud Osborn accompanied by Richard Tetrault’s woodprints) and The Sleep of Four Cities by Jen Currin; a City of Vancouver Book Award winner (Heroines); winner of the W.O. Mitchell Prize (Knucklehead & Other Stories, a debut collection by W. Mark Giles); a finalist nomination for the Books In Canada/Amazon.ca First Novel Award (The Beautiful Dead End); a Governor General’s Award finalist (Bogman’s Music); two Millennium Book Award recipients (White Lung & Under the Abdominal Wall); two additional finalists for the City of Vancouver Book Prize (White Lung and The Door is Open); two additional BC Book Awards finalists (The Door is Open & Ivanhoe Station); a ReLit Award winner in the novel category (Skin).
You can learn more about Anvil Press by visiting our website at www.anvilpress.com.