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York University to host Canadian Jewish Literary Awards

Jewish literary awardsYork University’s Centre for Jewish Studies will host the 2015 Canadian Jewish Literary Awards on Oct. 18, highlighting important contributions to Canadian literature featuring Jewish themes and subjects.

The gala awards ceremony will be held at 2pm at the Tribute Communities Recital Hall, Room 120 Accolade East Building. Admission is free.

The awards celebrate the vibrancy of Jewish literature and culture in Canada. This year's event recognizes written works in nine categories.

The categories and winners are:

Novel – Nora Gold for Fields of Exile (Dundurn Press)

Scholarship – James A. Diamond for Maimonides and the Shaping of the Jewish Canon (Cambridge University Press)

Biography/Memoir – Alison Pick for Between Gods: A Memoir (Doubleday Canada)

History – Joseph Hodes for From India to Israel: Identity, Immigration, and the Struggle for Religious Equality (McGill-Queen’s University Press)

Youth Literature – Suri Rosen for Playing with Matches (ECW Press)

Poetry – Robyn Sarah for My Shoes Are Killing Me (Biblioasis)

Holocaust Literature – Beverley Chalmers for Birth, Sex and Abuse: Women's Voices Under Nazi Rule (Grosvenor House)

Short Fiction – Mireille Silcoff for Chez l’Arabe (House of Anansi)

Yiddish – Ruth Panofsky for The Collected Poems of Miriam Waddington: A Critical Edition (University of Ottawa Press)

The winners were selected from some 60 submissions, which were adjudicated by a panel of distinguished writers, editors and scholars.

Robyn Sarah, winner in the poetry category, was a named a finalist for this year’s Governor General's Award in the poetry category.

The Canadian Jewish Literary Awards was founded by a group of prominent writers, editors and scholars. The awards are hosted and sponsored by the Israel & Golda Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies at York University, with the co-sponsorship of a consortium of other programs, including Western University’s Holocaust Literature Research Institute, the Concordia University Chair in Canadian Jewish Studies, the Vered Jewish Canadian Studies Program at the University of Ottawa, the journal Parchment in the Faculty of Arts at Ryerson University, McGill University's Department of Jewish Studies and the Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto.

To register in advance, visit cjlawards.eventbrite.ca. For more information, visit cjlawards.ca.