The Journey Prize Stories: From the Best of Canada's New Writers

Kimberly J. Frail is a librarian in the Science and Technology Library
at the University of Alberta.

Public Services Librarian
University of Alberta Libraries
Bibliothèque Saint-Jean

The purpose of this annual collection—formerly known as The Journey
Prize Anthology—is to introduce up-and-coming Canadian writers to
readers, publishers, and the literary community at large. The collection
also showcases the role that Canadian literary journals play in the
discovery and promotion of new writers. Submissions for the coveted
Journey Prize are made on behalf of the journals, and the task of
choosing the winner as well as the stories that will appear alongside it
in the anthology falls to the selection committee. Considering the
purpose of the contest and the resulting collection, it is appropriate
that this volume includes not only the stories but also short
biographies of featured authors as well as information regarding the
contributing journals. It also contains a list of previous contributing
authors (1989–2002), which includes the members of each selection
committee, as well as the annual Journey Prize winners.

The 2003 selection committee members—Michelle Berry, Timothy Taylor,
and Michael Winter—have assembled a sampling of diverse narrative
techniques and literary themes. Characters sometimes interact in a
frank, brutally detached manner, as do those in Hilary Dean’s “The
Lemon Stories” and Elyse Friedman’s “Truth.” On the other end of
the spectrum, protagonists such as Paul, a line-worker at a meat
processing plant in Rosario Campbell’s “Reaching,” offer intimate,
self-deprecating confessionals to help explain their lot in life.

As has been the case with previous editions, this 15th-anniversary
edition of the anthology is a testament to the ever-expanding world of
Canadian authors and to the Canadian publishing industry. It is a
collection that all aspiring Canadian writers should be aware of and is
a fundamental addition to any Canadian literature collection.