Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize Finalists

Tim Bowling is the author of 10 collections of poetry, four novels, and two works of non-fiction. His works include the poetry collection Tenderman, winner of the 2012 Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry, and In the Suicide’s Library: A Book Lover’s Journey, a work of non-fiction. Bowling's writing has earned him a Canadian Authors Association Award, two Governor General’s Literary Award nominations, a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and five Alberta Book Awards. Partially set in 1862 during the Battle of Antietam, Bowling's The Tinsmith tells the story of a Union Army surgeon deeply affected by a mysterious soldier who, 20 years after their first meeting, disappears.

Trevor Cole is among the very few Canadian writers whose first two novels, Norman Bray in the Performance of His Life and The Fearsome Particles, were shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award. Both novels also garnered a place on the longlist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His third novel, Practical Jean, was shortlisted for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and won the 2011 Leacock Medal for Humour. Most recently Trevor contributed to the Good Reads literacy project with the short novel Tribb's Troubles for adult learning readers.

Tamas Dobozy received his PhD in English from the University of British Columbia. His work has been published in journals throughout North America, and in 1995 he won the annual subTerrain short fiction contest. His first collection of short fiction, When X Equals Marylou, was shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Award. Dobozy teaches at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario. Dobozy’s Siege 13 is a collection of 13 linked stories tracing the ripple effect of the Second World War on characters directly involved, and on their friends, associates, sons, daughters, grandchildren and adoptive countries.

Born in Beirut, Lebanon, Rawi Hage lived through nine years of the Lebanese civil war. His debut novel, De Niro’s Game, won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and was a finalist for numerous prestigious awards, including the Scotiabank Giller Prize and a Governor General’s Literary Award. His second novel, Cockroach, won the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction. In Hage’s latest novel, Carnival, we meet Fly, the taxi-driving son of a trapeze artist and a flying-carpet man, as he encounters criminals, prostitutes, madmen, magicians, clowns, revolutionaries and ordinary people.

Alix Ohlin is the author of The Missing Person and Babylon and Other Stories. Her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, Best New American Voices and on public radio’s Selected Shorts. She lives in Easton, Pennsylvania, where she teaches at Lafayette College and in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. In her new short story collection, Signs and Wonders, characters are divorced and beginning to date again, childless and longing for children, married and aching for more. Ohlin shares Inside, a novel that begins with a Montreal therapist who stumbles across a man who has failed to hang himself.

Born and raised in Kansas, Linda Spalding immigrated to Canada from Hawaii in 1982. Spalding is the author of three previous novels and two acclaimed works of non-fiction: The Follow, which was shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award and the Pearson Writers’ Trust Non-Fiction Prize; and Who Named the Knife, the true story of the murder trial of Maryann Acker. She lives in Toronto, where she is an editor at Brick. She is also a past recipient of the Harbourfront Festival Prize. In Spalding’s new novel, The Purchase, a young Quaker father and widower leaves his home in Pennsylvania to establish a new life.