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Welcome to the Greber Writing Awards' blog. We welcome your comments and suggestions.
The Dave Greber Freelance Writers Book and Magazine Awards For Non Fiction Social Justice Writing are delighted to announce the winning writers for 2021
 The Yukon based writer Eva Holland is the winner of the $2000.00 2021 Dave Greber Freelance Writers Magazine Award. Eva's winning submission was her article "Justice on Trial", published in the June 2021 edition of The Walrus Magazine.
The article concerns the trial of Brayden Bushby who was charged with the death of Barbara Kentner. Kentner, a thirty-four-year-old First Nations woman, died from an internal injury after being struck in the abdomen with a trailer hitch. The article follows the course of a trial that would once more test the Indigenous communities’ faith in Canada’s legal system. https://thewalrus.ca/looking-for-justice-finding-betrayal/
Eva has been a full time freelancer for the past 14 years. Much of her work focuses on the environment, especially the intersection of wilderness and society. She has been in published in the New York Times, Wired, Bloomberg, Businessweek, the Washington Post, Smithsonian, Esquire, The Walrus, Cottage Life, Chatelaine, Hakai, the Globe and Mail, Canadian Geographic, Hazlitt, and Maisonneuve. Eva is a Western Magazine Awards winner and the author of the 2020 book Nerve: A Personal Journey Through the Science of Fear
 Our 2021 Dave Greber Freelance Writers Book Award winner is Josiah Neufeld. His winning book is called The Temple at the End of the Universe and is due to be published by House of Anansi Press in 2023.
Josiah Neufeld grew up in Burkina Faso the son of evangelical Christian missionaries. Alarmed and awakened to the ecological crisis humanity faces, Josiah journeys on a quest
for a spirituality that he hopes will transcend the religious binaries of his childhood faith and rise to meet the crisis of his time. The Temple at the End of the Universe is the story of that journey.
Based in Winnipeg, Josiah is a freelance writer who has contributed to The Walrus, The Globe and Mail, Hazlitt, Utne Reader Eighteen Bridges, Broadview, The Vancouver Sun and the Ottawa Citizen. He studied journalism and communications at Red River College and the University of Winnipeg and holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia. Josiah won the Dave Greber Freelance Writers Magazine Award in 2014. He received an award from Amnesty International Canada for his work and has contributed a monthly column to Broadview on spirituality and the climate crisis.
Our 2013 Book Award winner Chris Benjamin has a new work out titled Boy With a Problem that features twelve short stories about love, loss, failure and acceptance. The new book has been described this way "In sharp, insightful prose Boy With a Problem taps into the heart of our deeply human fear of failing to truly connect with others. The fissures that erupt between us, how quickly they widen from cracks to chasms—this is the thread running through these wise, raw, and tender stories."
As well as being an award winning author, Chris Benjamin is the managing editor of Atlantic Books Today. He is also the author of Indian School Road; Eco-Innovators and Drive-by Saviours; as well as several short stories in anthologies and journals.
Boy With a Problem can be pre-ordered from Amazon or purchased directly from Chris
email: chrisbenjaminwriting@gmail.com
twitter: @benjaminwrites
Commencing October 1, 2018 all updates and information about the awards and the Annual Call for Submissions will be sent out only to our Constant Contact newsletter subscribers. For a variety or reasons we will no longer be posting Awards news on Facebook. So to continue to stay in touch with news of the Awards, please subscribe (how about now?) on the home page of our web site (greberwritingaward.com) with a personal email address (sorry no info@ admin@ etc.). Thanks so much, please stay in touch by subscribing with us.
Chris Turner, the 2012 Greber Magazine Award winner has won the $30,000 National Business Book Award. “The Patch: The People, Pipelines, and Politics of the Oil Sands” (Simon & Schuster) is a comprehensive look at Canada’s pipeline debate.
Focused on Fort McMurray, and the oil sands in northern Alberta that contain the world’s second largest proven reserve of oil, it documents the collision between two conflicting world views–one of industrial triumph and another of environmental stewardship.
The award for the most outstanding Canadian business-related book in 2018 is co-sponsored by the BMO Financial Group and law firm Bennett Jones.
Former CBC chief correspondent Peter Mansbridge chaired this year’s jury, which also included Deirdre McMurdy, David Denison, Anna Porter, Pamela Wallin and Leonard Waverman.
The 2018 winner of the $2000.00, Dave Greber Freelance Writers Magazine Award for Social
Justice Writing is Angela Mombourquette from Halifax, Nova Scotia for her article "Island Access"
which was published in the May 2018 edition of the United Church Observer.
The article is about how abortion rights advocates in P.E.I. ultimately won a decades-long battle
to bring abortions back to the province.
The Dave Greber Freelance Writers Awards were established to honour Dave Greber of Calgary,
a long- time freelance writer, and they are unique in two ways: they empower working Canadian
freelance writers when they most need it in their work cycle; and they give special regard to those
working in the area of social justice. Excellence in writing, research and storytelling are hallmarks
of the awards. Note that no Book Award was given this year.
In the early 1980s, Prince Edward Islanders lost on-island access to abortion when a vocal antiabortion
lobby successfully pushed for the elimination of the island’s last Therapeutic Abortion Committees.
Abortion rights activists fought for decades with little effect until in 2011, when UPEI psychology
professor Colleen MacQuarrie launched a study that showed how Island women had been
affected by the province’s abortion policies. Her study propelled another wave of pro-choice
activism – and, in 2016, a legal challenge – that would ultimately force legislators to back down.
Angela Mombourquette is a freelance writer and editor, and the author of 25 Years of 22 Minutes:
An Unauthorized Oral History of This Hour Has 22 Minutes, published by Nimbus Publishing. She
is the former editor of Atlantic Books Today and former associate editor at Saltscapes magazine.
In 2012 she was awarded the George Cadogan Memorial Outstanding Columnist Award at the
Canadian Community Newspaper Awards for her weekly column in the Halifax Community
Herald. Her writing and photos have appeared in numerous print and web publications, including
The Walrus. In 2007 her short film, Vet Bill, won the Linda Joy Media Arts Post Award. She has a
Master of Journalism degree from the University of King's College.
The United Church Observer is a Canadian magazine, reporting on national and international
issues of faith, justice, ethics, daily living and pop culture. . It has won international acclaim for
journalistic excellence and garnered more awards for writing than any other Canadian religious
publication.
Note:
Commencing October 1, 2018 updates and information about the awards and the Annual Call for Submissions will be sent out only to our Constant Contact newsletter subscribers. So to continue to stay in touch with news of the Awards, please go to greberwritingaward.com and subscribe using a personal email address (sorry no info@ admin@ etc.). Thank you.
__________________________________________________________________
Contact Person: Shirley Dunn
Award Developer, Dave Greber Freelance Writers Award
Tel:1-403-259-5689 or 1-877-271-3283
Email dunnss@telusplanet.net
Angela Mombourquette angmombo@gmail.com
Deborah Campbell, the 2008 winner of the Dave Greber Freelance Writers Magazine Award will be joining UVic’s Department of Writing. Starting July 1, 2018, She will become the new assistant professor of creative nonfiction; she will also become Director of the Professional Program in January 2019.
Writing chair David Leach said of the appointment “Deborah Campbell instantly makes UVic’s Department of Writing the destination in Canada for aspiring nonfiction writers who want to learn how to fuse a distinct personal voice with a depth of research and a keen social conscience—just as Deborah has done for years,”
“Her on-the-ground experience as a writer and reporter for major international publications has prepared her to inspire a new generation of young journalists to investigate local and global issues amid a rapidly evolving publishing industry,” he continues. “And her immense talents as a prose stylist make her a natural fit for a department long known for mentoring several generations of Canada’s top creative writers.”
Campbell’s most recent book, A Disappearance in Damascus: A Story of Friendship and Survival in the Shadow of War (Knopf Canada 2016, Picador USA 2017), won both the Writers’ Trust Hilary Weston Prize and the Hubert Evans BC Book Prize.
We are delighted to announce the winners of the 2017 awards for both the Book and Magazine categories.
 The winner of the $5000.00 2017 Dave Greber Freelance Writers Book Award for Social Justice Writing is Vancouver freelance writer Geoff Dembicki for the chapter Staying Alive in Paris, from his book Are We Screwed? How a New Generation is Fighting to Survive Climate Change. The book is to be published by Bloomsbury in Canada, the U.S. and the UK in August.
Geoff Dembicki is a freelance journalist and author based in Vancouver, BC. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Carleton University in 2008 and started his writing career at The Tyee (thetyee.ca) covering the 2010 Winter Olympics. Dembicki then became the news website’ full-time climate and sustainability reporter. He reported from locations like Fort McMurray, Washington DC, South Dakota, New York, Beijing and Honolulu. In 2015,he left The Tyee to begin writing his first book, Are We Screwed? How a New Generation is Fighting to Survive Climate Change.
Dembicki’s work has appeared in outlets like the New York Times, Foreign Policy, VICE, the Guardian, Penthouse, the Walrus and the Toronto Star. He has won fellowships from the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada and the New York-based Solutions Journalism Network.
https://twitter.com/geoffdembicki
 The winner of the $2000.00 2017 Dave Greber Freelance Writers Magazine Award for Social Justice Writing is Toronto freelance writer Sally Armstrong for the magazine article Resisting Genocide, the story of the 2014 slaughter and forced sexual slavery of thousands of Iraqi Yazidi women and girls. The article was published in June 2017 by the United Church Observer.
Sally Armstrong has covered stories about women and girls in zones of conflict all over the world. From Bosnia and Somalia to the Middle East, Rwanda, Congo and Afghanistan and Iraq, her eye witness reports have earned her awards including the Gold Award from the National Magazine Awards Foundation and the Author's Award from the Foundation for the Advancement of Canadian Letters. She received the Amnesty International Canada Media Award in 2000, 2002 and again in 2011. Sally was made a member of the Order of Canada in 1998 and appointed as an Officer of the Order of Canada by Governor General Julie Payette in December, 2017.
Sally has been the editor of Homemaker Magazine, and authored several books, the most recent of which is Ascent of Women: A New Age is Dawning for Every Mother’s Daughter published by Random House in 2013. It was updated and re-titled to Uprising: A New Age in Dawning for Every Mother’s Daughter by St Martins Press in New York and published in 2014.
As editor-in-chief of Homemaker Magazine, she was the first to publish a story on the systematic raping of women and girls during the Balkan war in 1992.
For the last seventeen years, she has been a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in Maclean's Magazine, the National Post, L'Acutalite, Chatelaine, Reader’s Digest, the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, the New York Times and The United Church Observer.
The focus of her freelance work for the last decade has been chiefly on covering zones of conflict from the point of view of what happens to women and girls.
She feels that "a journalist can shine a blazing hot light on social injustice and that by researching the facts, exposing the truth and bringing the data to life with eye witness reports, the writer can bring missing or previously unknown information to the reading audience and can influence that audience to speak up and take action. "
Despite the challenges of investigating and reporting on stories relating to the experiences of women and girls in places such as Afghanistan, the Congo, and Nepal, she feels rewarded because in her experience "the coverage of their status has moved their stories from obscure to page one."
Her winning submission is called Resisting Genocide and details the experience of the Yazidi women who were taken by ISIS as sex slaves, their return and their subsequent fight to keep their way of life . It was published in The United Church Observer on June 1, 2017
https://www.sallyarmstrong.ca/
Detailed information about the writers and their winning works will be available in late September both on the Dave Greber Freelance Writers Award Website www.greberwritingaward.com and via our upcoming newsletter. To stay in touch with the Awards please Click and sign up to be part of our mailing list. The winners will also be announced on social media.
Chris Turner, the 2012 Greber Magazine Award winner has written a new book that will be available in mid-September.
Called The Patch: The People, Pipelines, and Politics of the Oil Sands it is the story of Fort McMurray and the oil sands in northern Alberta, the world’s second largest proven reserve of oil.
Focused on Fort McMurray, it documents the collision between two conflicting worldviews–one of industrial triumph and another of environmental stewardship.
The Creative Writing Program at the University of British Columbia has chosen 2007 Greber Magazine Award winner John Vigna as it's first tenure-track Instructor. He will focus on pedagogical and curricular strategies for 5500 Creative Writing students across the MFA, Major, and Minor programs, including online edX innovations. Congratulations John!
See the full UBC announcement.
Deborah Campbell is the 2017 Winner of the B.C. Book Prizes` Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize for her book A Disappearance in Damascus: A Story of Friendship and Survival in the Shadow of War (Knopf Canada). The award was presented earlier this year by the West Coast Book Prize Society.
Deborah Campbell was the 2008 Greber Magazine Award winner for her article published in the April 2008 issue of Harper's magazine entitled Exodus: Where will Iraq Go Next? She says of her new book:
“Did I find her or did she find me? I wrote that question in my reporter’s notebook soon after I met Ahlam, the Iraqi woman who was to change my life. It was 2007 and we had only recently begun working together in Damascus. I was the journalist; she was my interpreter and guide—my “fixer”—connecting me to refugees from Iraq… As she led me ever deeper inside the hidden world of the war she had fled, and into the increasingly unstable country of Syria where she had sought refuge from Iraq, she showed me what survival looks like with all the scaffolding of normal life ripped away. When I wrote that question, I had no idea what it would come to mean nearly a year later, when she was taken from me by agents of the secret police.”
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