Famous Vancouver writer, Jasmine Sealy, has won the 2023 Amazon First Novel Award for her book titled ‘The Island of Forgetting.’
The $60,000 prize honours the best debut Canadian novel of the year.
The Island of Forgetting tells a story that spans four generations, each from the standpoint of a different family member who must navigate desire, duty, identity and family secrets while operating a beachfront hotel. Her novel is about the ghosts of what goes unsaid and the stories we share to fill the absence.
The Barbadian-Canadian writer finalized her MFA in creative writing at the University of British Columbia. At that time, she won the 2020 UBC/HarperCollins Best New Fiction Prize for the story she wrote for her master’s thesis. After she was awarded literary representation and a book publication from HarperCollins, she transformed her thesis into The Island of Forgetting.
After winning the award, Sealy said: “It’s the honour of my very brief and young career, I’m completely overwhelmed! My fellow shortlisted authors are incredible, I’m huge fan of them all. I’m still a little bit in shock!”
Other finalists were Billy-Ray Belcourt for ‘A Minor Chorus’, Jessica Johns for ‘Bad Cree’, André Forget for ‘In the City of Pigs’, William Ping for ‘Hollow Bamboo and Kai Thomas for In the Upper Country.’
They will receive $6,000 each.
The jury comprised Sharon Bala, author of The Boat People, Kim Fu, author of the story collection Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, Heather O’Neill, author of Lullabies for Little Criminals and Zalika Reid-Benta, author of the short story collection Frying Plantain.
During the ceremony, author and juror Heather O’Neill said: “You want the younger writers to know there’s a scope of what Canadian literature can be and it’s not just going to look like one thing. So there was a consciousness within putting that list together that it would represent different genres of what is being written in Canada today.”
Past winners include Michelle Good for her novel ‘Five Little Indians’, Stéphane Larue for ‘The Dishwasher’, Joy Kogawa for ‘Obasan’, Rohinton Mistry for ‘Such a Long Journey’, Anne Michaels for ‘Fugitive Pieces’ and Madeleine Thien for ‘Certainty.’
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