Bezmozgis’s multigenerational tale wins First Novel Award from Amazon
Posted April 26, 2012 9:03 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
TORONTO – Toronto author David Bezmozgis is the winner of this year’s First Novel Award from Amazon.ca.
Bezmozgis claimed the prize for his HarperCollins Canada book “The Free World,” about three generations of Russian Jews who seek new lives in the West.
The prize comes with a cheque for $7,500. It was awarded Thursday in Toronto.
“The Free World” was also a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award.
Amazon’s First Novel Award recognizes outstanding achievement by first-time Canadian novelists.
Bezmozgis beat out finalists Fraser Nixon for “The Man Who Killed” (Douglas & McIntyre), Sina Queyras for “Autobiography of Childhood” (Coach House Books), Olive Senior for “Dancing Lessons” (Cormorant Books) and Alexi Zentner for “Touch” (Knopf Canada).
Bezmozgis was born in Latvia in 1973 and immigrated to Toronto with his parents in 1980.
His first book of short stories, “Natasha and Other Stories,” won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book (Canada and Caribbean Region).
Stuart Woods, editor of Quill & Quire, selected the finalists and described “The Free World” as an ambitious, self-assured first novel that confirms Bezmozgis “as a leading author of his generation.”
“In relating the at-times humorous, at-times tragic story of the Krasnanskys — a Soviet-Jewish family at loose ends in Rome as they prepare to immigrate to Canada — David Bezmozgis writes with compassion and a fine sense of irony about an overlooked facet of the immigrant experience,” Woods said Thursday in a statement.
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Online: www.amazon.ca/firstnovelaward
