ABOUT

The Manitoba Book Awards have been a meaningful part of the province’s writing and publishing communities since 1989. For more than three decades, the Awards celebrated Manitoban authors, editors, publishers, designers working in English and in French.

For most of its history, the Manitoba Book Awards were a joint project of the Association of Manitoba Book Publishers and the Manitoba Writers’ Guild.

From 2017 to 2023, a coalition made up of Plume Winnipeg (formerly the Winnipeg International Writers Festival), Association of Manitoba Book Publishers, Winnipeg Public Library, and Manitoba Writers’ Guild was responsible for the book awards and together worked hard to create new efficiencies while navigating emerging challenges, from pandemic disruptions to changes in available resources.

In November 2023, after many years of demanding work in challenging circumstances, the coalition placed the awards on hiatus and secured funding from The Winnipeg Foundation to underwrite a detailed study by Kayla Calder, an Ottawa-based consultant with experience in the not-for-profit and writing and publishing sectors. After several months of sectoral research and significant input from the local community, Calder’s released her report, which recommended disbanding the coalition managing the Manitoba Book Awards/Les Prix du livre du Manitoba as well as the awards program itself. 

The study noted that “the current system is not working, and the landscape has become increasingly unstable. Disbanding the umbrella program creates an opportunity to explore new approaches to some awards and allows space for new initiatives to emerge.”

In August 2024, all four organizations announced that they’d accepted the recommendation to disband the program and to dissolve the coalition.

Under the generous guidance of many of those previous shepherds, and with an enthusiastic new group of writers responding to the call from many others to reinstate the Manitoba Book Awards, work has been undertaken to revise and renew our provincial literary prizes.

We gratefully acknowledge the ongoing support of our sponsors: