SHORTLISTED: QWF Award for Fiction

My Thievery of the People was one of five titles shortlisted this year for the QWF Paragraphe Hugh Maclennan Prize for Fiction. Inasmuch as prizes and awards for artistic endeavours are weird rolling idiosyncratic things (look at you, figure skating judges), it was exciting to be nominated, to be there with Lee Lai, and to have even written a speech just in case. Weird but yeah it was fun. Below is what the jury said. And as nice as it is, when they read that aloud I knew I hadn't won. To have focussed only on the language was to have missed the point of what I was trying to do and what, some people think at least, I succeeded at.

About My Thievery of the People, the jury wrote:

These sharp, witty, emotionally savvy stories explore surface and subterranean levels of motivation and feeling, evoking the zigzag of desire, the contradictions of commitment, and the flotsam and jetsam of messy human interaction. 

The stories vibrate with tension and desire, propelling characters forward into action and into profound moments of illumination. 

With spare prose that packs punch after punch, … Marshy has written a guidebook for surviving on the precipice of apocalypse. She shows us how to be strong, how to live, and how to find hope. These stories pulse with rebellion and a clairvoyant understanding of the inner workings of the soul.