The youth winners of the 2022 Booksellers Awards were announced Thursday morning. The novelist Fanny Britt notably won honors in the category of best Quebec comic strip with Truffle.
Third collaboration between the author and the illustrator Isabelle Arsenault, this album published last September is mainly aimed at primary school children, although the text is tinged with references to the music of the 1960s. once awarded for her work, just four months after receiving the Governor General’s Literary Award for her novel Make the sugars.
Outraged Truffle (La Pastèque), the Association des libraires du Québec (ALQ) awarded the prize for the best Quebec children’s book for 0-5 year olds to Anne Renaud and Élodie Duhameau for Albertine Petit-Brindamour hates Brussels sprouts.
The singer Patrice Michaud wins this prize for the age group of 6 to 11 years with his first children’s book, Match soup (Fonfon), illustrated by cartoonist Guillaume Perreault.
Finally, among teenagers, booksellers salute the work of author and children’s screenwriter Sarah Lalonde, whose novel anxious trash, published in May 2021 by Leméac, addresses a hot topic, eco-anxiety.
The winners in these four categories each leave with a $3,000 grant from the Conseil des arts de Montréal. Otherwise, booksellers also celebrated children’s literature published outside Quebec.
If I disappear (Isatis) takes top honors in the 12-17 age group. Written by three Manitoba Indigenous women, Brianna Jonnie, Nahanni Shingoose and Neal Shannacappo, this poignant graphic novel tackles head-on the painful issue of missing First Nations women.
A much lighter work, the series Lightfall (Gallimard), by science fiction author Tim Probert, is voted best comic strip outside Quebec. The papaya castle, by the American Sara Pennypacker, also published by Gallimard, was voted best foreign book for young people aged 6 to 11. This distinction goes to under the waves (The 400 blows) of the Spaniards Meritxell Marti and Xavier Salomo in toddlers.