The Koffler Centre of the Arts announced the winners of the 2018 Vine Awards for Canadian Jewish Literature. The announcement was made this afternoon at the Awards Lunch at the Windsor Arms Hotel in Toronto.

Fiction: Class Mom – Laurie Gelman (Henry Holt and Company) – “Class Mom by Laurie Gelman is a wonderful, clever, and fun read providing a worthy spoof of today’s parents: It’s as close to ‘soccer/hockey moms’ in the classroom as you can get!”

Non-Fiction: Siberian Exile: Blood, War, and a Granddaughter’s Reckoning – Julija Sukys (University of Nebraska Press) – “Julija Sukys’s Serbian Exile is heroic in that it relentlessly unearths a dark and horrid history, even when the crimes she reveals have been committed by her own forebears.”

History: The Blue Shirts: Adrien Arcand and Fascist Anti-Semitism in Canada – Hugues Théoret (University of Ottawa Press) – “Not enough is known about Anti-Semitism in Canada. It is still endured by many Jewish Canadians and this beautifully written book brings the subject into much needed sharp relief.”

Children’s/Young Adult: Rare is Everywhere – Deborah Katz (Miss Bird Books) – “Fun, exciting and such a different take on difference and diversity for our small children.”

A full story will follow later.

The Vine Awards honour both the best Canadian Jewish writers and Canadian authors who deal with Jewish subjects in four categories; fiction, non-fiction, history and young adult/children’s literature; each with a prize of $10,000.