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29 Apr, 2015

Detachment wins an award and has more media adventures

This last Saturday evening, April 25, I won the Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award for Non-Fiction at the Manitoba Book Awards. I didn’t expect to win, and became a bit incoherent from excitement and an overheated room. I hope that this brings some new readers for Detachment.

Earlier this year I did one of those self-interviews for Mr. rob mclennan’s blog (see how I worked that cap in there?).

Joel Yanofsky reviewed Detachment in the March issue of Literary Review of Canada, and he said nice things such as:

“Writing with heartfelt honesty about his own self-doubt and self-absorption, Mierau is forced to do what he assumed… he could not–pay close attention to the daily, often mundane trials of fatherhood. As for the victories in Detachment, they are hard won and incremental and the more believable for it.”

The Winnipeg Free Press Best of the Bunch books list included Detachment back in December. Michael Elves interviewed me on his UMFM radio show Turning Pages also in December; Michael just converses with you about your book, without any notes, an impressive feat. You can hear his fluidity (not mine) here.

Further back in the fall, Calgary radio station CJSW did an interview with me that’s now on their soundcloud site. Also somewhere back then I wrote a long essay on the ethics of writing about your family for the AllLitUp web site, for which they even paid me. Then I did four blog posts for the National Post‘s AfterWords page, starting with this one.

The Calgary Herald ran a substantial excerpt from the book, which was wonderful, and I appeared on CTV’s local morning show in early November, highly caffeinated and somewhat alert. You can read more about my time in Alberta in the National Post blog series.