The Prairie Grindstone Prize is delighted to present this year’s Prairie Grindstone Prize and $50,000 to Marina Endicott for her outstanding body of work and her generous engagement with the writing community. 

“The Prairie Grindstone Prize by its very name acknowledges how difficult it is to make a living as a writer, and how vital the work is,” says Marina Endicott. “To be given a period of silence, and an investment in the writing itself: this is a true honour, and I’m grateful, energized, and inspired to get back to work.”

The jury members this year were Elena Bentley, Netta Johnson, and Caitilin Terfloth.

“Marina’s prose pulls the reader in magnetically, layering and entwining beautiful narratives with every passing page,” says Netta Johnson, Publisher and Managing Editor at Stonehouse Publishing.

“Over the course of her prolific and expansive writing career, Marina Endicott has mentored numerous writers with generosity and sincerity,” adds Caitilin Terfloth, Executive Director for Sage Hill Writing. “What a joy it is to award The Prairie Grindstone Prize to a writer of such dedication to the writing community; may it allow Marina some much deserved time and space to focus on her next notable work!”

Marina Endicott was born in Golden, BC, and grew up all over Canada. She came to Saskatoon in 1984 to work in theatre, but began writing fiction; her first story was published in Grain Magazine. Since then she’s written six novels, and many stories, essays, memoirs and poems; her work has been published in Canada, England, the US, Germany, the Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand. 

Her books have been short-listed for the Giller Prize, the Governor General’s award and CBC’s Canada Reads; Good to a Fault won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book, Canada/Caribbean. Her latest, The Observer, won the City of Saskatoon Fiction Prize and was Saskatchewan’s Book of the Year. 

She mentors writers at the University of Saskatchewan’s MFA program and Humber and teaches at the University of Alberta’s Augustana Faculty; she sits on the board of the Saskatchewan Writers Guild. She’s been lucky enough to research her novels in New Zealand, Tonga, Bali, Hong Kong, Nova Scotia and the Bahamas, and lately the Interior of British Columbia, but is always happy to come home to Saskatoon. 

The Prairie Grindstone Prize, funded by an anonymous donor committee, alternates between the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan. This is the fourth year of the prize and the second time it has returned to Saskatchewan. 

This is not a book prize; it is awarded in acknowledgement of an author’s body of work and their contribution to the public’s appreciation for, and understanding of, Western Canada’s landscape, people, history, and culture. The writer must have been a resident of the province of Saskatchewan for the past five years, have a minimum of four professionally published books, and be an active member of the local writing community.

A video of the announcement was aired on Youtube Live on June 23 at 12 PM (CST).