The search is now underway to find the next literary star in northwestern Ontario.
The Northwestern Ontario Writers’s Workshop is now accepting entries to its annual writing contest.
It awards prizes in five different categories, poetry, short fiction, historical fiction, creative non-fiction, and the Bill MacDonald Prize for Prose.
Contest Coordinator, Jodene Wylie says its primarily aimed at short story authors with stories capped at about 35-hundred words while five submissions are welcoming in the poetry category.
While the contest is aimed at writers from northwestern Ontario, last year’s contest drew about 160 authors from across the country, including a few from outside Canada.
Governor General Award winner and parliamentary poet, George Elliott Clarke, will judge the poetry category.
Governor General’s Award winner, Ross King, author of Leonardo and the Last Supper, will judge the historical fiction category.
Lullabies for Little Criminals author and Governor General’s Award winner, Heather O’Neill, will judge the short fiction category.
The creative non-fiction category will be judged by Helen Humphrey, author of Leaving Earth and Afterimage, which won the Writer’s Trust Fiction Prize.
Michael Christie, born in Thunder Bay and author of The Beggar’s Garden, which was short listed for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, will judge the Bill MacDonald Prize for Prose in Creative Non-fiction.
A link to enter can be found here.