Craig Davidson Reads February 9

The University of New Brunswick would like to invite you to hear a reading by UNB Alumnus Craig Davidson, author of The Giller Prize short-listed Cataract City, published in 2013 by Doubleday. In his fourth literary novel Davidson presents a tourist town with an uncanny hold over those born within its borders, a place with more to it than first meets the eye. Beyond the gaudy storefronts and sidewalk vendors, past the hawkers of tourist T-shirts and souvenirs, are the townspeople who toil at The Bisk, the local cookie factory. And behind that crumbling façade are the truly desperate: those drawn to gritty alleyways on both sides of the US-Canada border, inhabitants of a shadow world that runs on money exchanged over dog races, bare-knuckle brawls, and night-time smuggling.

Davidson is the author of Rust and Bone, which was a finalist for the 2006 Danuta Gleed Literary Award and was made into a Golden Globe-nominated feature film of the same name. His other literary works include The Fighter and Sarah Court. His articles and journalism have been published in the National Post, Esquire, GQ, The Walrus, and The Washington Post, among other places.

Davidson has also published under the pen names Patrick Lestewka and Nick Cutter. Under the name Cutter he is the acclaimed author of The Troop (2014), about which Stephen King raved it “scared the hell out of me and I couldn’t put it down . . . old-school horror at its best.” Cutter’s latest novel The Deep has just been published by Simon & Schuster; it features a plague that threatens humanity on a global scale.

His reading will be held Monday, February 9th at 8:00pm in Memorial Hall on the UNB Fredericton Campus. Admission is free and all are welcome to attend.

Introducing the Judges for The Fiddlehead's 24th Annual Literary Contest

We have now closed The Fiddlehead's Annual Literary contest, and we are thrilled to announce the panel of judges reading the submissions this year.

Fiction Judge

Craig Davidson, credit Kevin Kelly

Craig Davidson was born and grew up in St. Catharines, Ontario, near Niagara Falls. He has published three previous books of literary fiction: Rust and Bone, which was made into a feature film of the same name, The Fighter, and Sarah Court. Davidson is a graduate of the University of New Brunswick, and his articles and journalism have been published in the National Post, Esquire, GQ, The Walrus, and The Washington Post, among other places. He lives in Toronto, Canada, with his partner and their child.

Follow Craig's alter-ego on Twitter.

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The Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize Judges

Jeramy Dodds

Jeramy Dodds grew up in Orono, Ontario, Canada. He is the winner of the 2006 Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award and the 2007 CBC Literary Award for poetry. His first collection of poems, Crabwise to the Hounds, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and won the Trillium Book Award for poetry. He is a poetry editor at Coach House Books. His most recent publication is an English translation of the Poetic Edda. He is currently the Writer-in-Residence at the University of New Brunswick.

Follow Jeramy on Twitter: @jeramy_dodds

Sina Queyras

Sina Queyras is the author most recently of MxT. She lives and works in Montreal.

Follow Sina on Twitter.

Danny Jacobs

Danny Jacobs’ poems have been published in a variety of journals across Canada, including The Fiddlehead, Arc, Event, The Malahat Review, Grain, and Hazlitt, among others. He has also written reviews for Maisonneuve and Vallum. His first book, Songs That Remind Us of Factories

(Nightwood, 2013), was shortlisted for the 2014 Acorn-Plantos Award for People’s Poetry. Danny completed an MA in creative writing at The University of New Brunswick in 2008 (he did a fiction thesis) and went on to do an MLIS at Dalhouise (2011). Danny now lives with his wife in Riverview, NB and works as the librarian in the village of Petitcodiac.You can follow him on Twitter: @DannyJJacobs. 

And don't forget, The Fiddlehead is on Twitter too!

Contest winners (including the honourable mentions) will be featured in our Spring 2015 Issue No. 263.

Fiddlehead News

No. 258 Winter 2014

The Fiddlehead's Winter 2014 issue has just been reviewed at New Pages! Reviewer Chip Livingston says that it "turns on moments of awareness of awareness, capturing the instants we catch ourselves catching ourselves, revelations of self to self, to the reader, and to other characters. It’s charming, this subtle focus moving from piece to piece, from poem to prose to poem to poem, and the sequence suggests this international journal from the University of New Brunswick is edited with precision." Read the full review here!

Myler Wilkinson, the winner of our recently-announced fiction contest was celebrated in his hometown newspaper, The Castlegar News, with a very nice profile. Wilkinson's story "Blood of Slaves" appears in our Spring 2014 issue. Read the article here.

Myler Wilkinson

Congratulations to Craig Davidson and Adam Dickinson, both UNB alumi and past Fiddlehead contributors, for being shortlisted for Trillium Awards. Davidson is a finalist for his Giller-shortlisted novel Cataract City and Dickinson for his Governor General's Award-nominated poetry collection The Polymers. View the shortlists here.

And finally, recent Fiddlehead editorial assistant Richard Kemick has been interviewed by Echolocation. Kemick recently graduated from the MA (English and Creative Writing) program at UNB. Read the interview here. And keep an eye out for a few of Richard's poems in this summer's poetry issue of The Fiddlehead!

UNB MA Creative Writing Alumnus Craig Davidson shortlisted for 2013 Giller Prize

Photo credit Kevin Kelly

The Fiddlehead would like to congratulate Craig Davidson on his being named to the 2013 Giller Prize shortlist. While a student in the Creative Writing MA at UNB, Craig was an editorial assistant for The Fiddlehead. Later, he won our annual contest with a story called "28 Bones" which went on to become the title story of his short story collection Rust and Bone. That book later came to the attention of French director Jacques Audiard, who used two of the stories for the critically-acclaimed movie De rouille et d'os (Rust and Bone). Craig's most recent story appeared in The Fiddlehead's summer fiction issue, which was also featured at The Literarian, an online magazine of The New York Center for Fiction.

Here's a selection of Canadian media stories about the shortlist, announced yesterday:

CBC

Globe and Mail

The National Post

The Toronto Star

Congratulations Craig, and good luck!