We’re so happy to announce that the French translation for Small Game Hunting by Megan Gail Coles and translated by Melissa Verreault wins the 2022 Governor General’s Award for Translation!
The Canada Council for the Arts is responsible for administering and promoting the Governor General’s Literary Awards (GGBooks), which recognize Canada’s best English-language and French-language books in seven categories: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama, young people’s literature – text, young people’s literature – illustrated books, and translation. The awards promote Canadian literature and encourage Canadians to read. They provide finalists and winners with valuable recognition from peers and readers across the country.
By turns savage, biting, funny, poetic, and heartbreaking, Megan Gail Coles’s debut novel rips into the inner lives of a wicked cast of characters, exposing class, gender, and racial tensions over the course of one Valentine’s Day in the dead of a winter storm.
Valentine’s Day, the longest day of the year.
A fierce blizzard is threatening to tear a strip off the city, while inside The Hazel restaurant a storm system of sex, betrayal, addiction, and hurt is breaking overhead. Iris, a young hostess, is forced to pull a double despite resolving to avoid the charming chef and his wealthy restaurateur wife. Just tables over, Damian, a hungover and self-loathing server, is trying to navigate a potential punch-up with a pair of lit customers who remain oblivious to the rising temperature in the dining room. Meanwhile Olive, a young woman far from her northern home, watches it all unfurl from the fast and frozen street.
Through rolling blackouts, we glimpse the truth behind the shroud of scathing lies and unrelenting abuse, and discover that resilience proves most enduring in the dead of this winter’s tale.
Winner, BMO Winterset Award
Finalist, Scotiabank Giller Prize
Finalist, CBC Canada Reads
A Globe and Mail Book of the Year
A CBC Book of the Year
“Beautifully fluid writing pulls the reader right in and keeps them gliding along. Fans of Rene Denfeld, Alice Sebold, and Eowyn Ivey will want to check this book out.” — Booklist
“What recommends this novel most is the way its author stays with her characters’ hurt, how she holds it without reverence but understands how those wounds can motivate like nothing else … Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club is a dark, taut, funny novel that feels for its characters’ pain while remaining caustic toward the enablers and the kinds of violence that polite society allows.” — Globe and Mail
Megan Gail Coles is a graduate of Memorial University of Newfoundland and the National Theatre School of Canada, and she has recently completed a Masters of Fine Arts from the University of British Columbia. She has written and produced numerous plays. Her first fiction collection, Eating Habits of the Chronically Lonesome, won the BMO Winterset Award, the ReLit Award, and the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award, and it earned her the one-time Writers’ Trust 5×5 prize. Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club, her debut novel, was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Originally from Savage Cove on the Great Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland, Megan currently resides in Montreal, where she is a Ph.D. candidate at Concordia University.
Megan Gail Coles is represented by Samantha Haywood.
To learn more, check out: https://ggbooks.ca/