Katie Bickell Wins Fiction Award at 2021 Alberta Literary Awards

TouchWood Editions is pleased to announce that Always Brave, Sometimes Kind by Katie Bickell is the winner of the 2021 Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction at the Alberta Literary Awards. The winners were announced in an online video release on June 9th.

Always Brave, Sometimes Kind is Bickell’s debut novel told in connected stories that capture diverse and complicated networks of people. When asked about the win, a thrilled Bickell shared, “I feel so honoured that Always Brave, Sometimes Kind was chosen as the winner, and I can’t thank the Writer’s Guild of Alberta and the Alberta Literary Award sponsors enough for their dedication to promoting Albertan writers. I can’t wait to dive into the many wonderful reads that were chosen, as the jury’s comments on each finalist’s piece were so insightful and persuasive. I hope to continue to represent the beautiful, complex, always brave, and sometimes kind province of Alberta in my work as my career progresses, and I am grateful for and humbled by the opportunity to do so.”

The award jury remarked, “This is a beautiful, character-driven exploration of contemporary life in Alberta. Katie Bickell shows her sophisticated skill as a writer by writing convincingly from multiple points-of-view and in constructing chapters that work as a novel and can be read as stand-alone stories. The prose itself sings. Always Brave, Sometimes Kind is a gritty love letter to the province as a place to call home.”

This celebration marks the 39th anniversary of the Alberta Literary Awards and brought together writers from across Alberta. The Alberta Literary Awards were created by the Writers’ Guild of Alberta in 1982 to recognize excellence in writing by Alberta authors. This year, jurors deliberated over 250 submissions to select winners in eight categories.

For more information, please visit writersguild.ca.