Transatlantic is proud to share that Zalika Reid-Benta’s RIVER MUMMA is a Finalist for the 2024 Trillium Book Award!
The Ontario government established the Trillium Book Award in 1987 to recognize excellence, support marketing and foster increased public awareness of the quality and diversity of Ontario writers and writing.
This prestigious Award is the province’s leading award for literature. The quality of Ontario authors and writing speaks for itself with the international acclaim achieved by past Trillium winners including Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Timothy Findley and Anne Michaels.
Learn more about the awards: https://www.ontariocreates.ca/our-sectors/book/trillium-book-award/finalists-2024trillium-book-award
About RIVER MUMMA:
Alicia has been out of grad school for months. She has no career prospects and lives with her mom, who won’t stop texting her macabre news stories and reminders to pick up items from the grocery store.
Then, one evening, the Jamaican water deity, River Mumma, appears to Alicia, telling her that she has twenty-four hours to scour the city for her missing comb.
Alicia doesn’t understand why River Mumma would choose her. She can’t remember all the legends her relatives told her, unlike her retail co-worker Heaven, who can reel off Jamaican folklore by heart. She doesn’t know if her childhood visions have returned, or why she feels a strange connection to her other co-worker Mars. But when the trio are chased down by malevolent spirits called duppies, they realize their tenuous bonds to each other may be their only lifelines. With the clock ticking, Alicia’s quest through the city broadens into a journey through time—to find herself and what the river carries.
River Mumma is a powerful portrayal of diasporic identities and a vital examination into ancestral ties. It is a homage to Jamaican storytelling by one of the most invigorating voices in Canadian literature.
Zalika Reid-Benta is a Toronto-based writer whose debut story collection, Frying Plantain, won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award and the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for Literary Fiction. Frying Plantain was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and it was shortlisted for the Toronto Book Award, the White Pine Award, and the Trillium Book Award. Zalika served as the 2021-2022 Writer in Residence at Western University and was the chair of the 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize. She received an M.F.A. in fiction from Columbia University, was a John Gardner Fiction Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and is an alumnus of the Banff Centre Writing Studio.
Zalika is represented by Amy Tompkins.
Congratulations Zalika!