A ghoulish collection by Toronto writer Lisa Foad was the winner of this year’s Relit Award for short stories.
Foad, whose monthly Loose Lips column appears in Xtra, is a longtime contributor. The Night is a Mouth is her first book.
“The Night is a Mouth is relentlessly dystopic: all families are dysfunctional, all romantic relationships doomed, all food destined to find its way back out of the stomach through the throat,” wrote Jessica Taylor in Xtra’s review of the collection in January.
The Relit Awards honours books by Canada’s smaller presses and its tagline is “ideas, not money.” Winners receive a ring engraved with the alphabet on four moveable dials.
“It’s an absolutely fabulous book,” Relit founder Kenneth Harvey said of The Night is A Mouth in an interview with the CBC. “It’s very edgy but it has a backbone of good storytelling and that’s what this award is about.”
The collection beat out much-feted books of last season, including fellow freshman Rebecca Rosenblum’s Once and Pasha Malla’s The Withdrawal Method and finalists Arjun Basu, Betsy Trumpener, Don McLellan, Pamela Stewart, Mark Anthony Jarman, and Ian Colford.
Foad’s win in the short story category was announced Sep 20. Novelist Michael Blouin took home the hardware for Chase & Haven and poet Maurice Mierau won for his collection Fear Not.
THE NIGHT IS A MOUTH.
Lisa Foad.
Exile Editions. $22.
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