Congratulations to Canadian Jewish Literature Award Winner Gary Barwin

Our week continues with another great honor for a poet we're proud to have as part of the PennSound archives. This time, we send our heartiest congratulations to Gary Barwin — a fine experimental poet and a talented fiction writer to boot — whose novel, Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy (Random House Canada), was just named a winner of the 2021 Canadian Jewish Literary Awards in Fiction.

In their citation, the judges hail Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy as "a work of unbounded imagination following a wannabe cowboy, Motl, as he and his mother flee Vilna and the Nazis massacre of the Jews." They continue: "The phantasmagoria of ensuing events, characters and horror are met by Motl with an equally bizarre set of puns and humorous absurdity in the face of tragedy. This original and moving exploration of genocide and persecution is filled with heartbreak and the enduring quest for hope in the face of horror of the Shoah." In conclusion, they find Barwin's "integration of tragedy and humour, in the Jewish tradition," to be "masterful."

You can read more about the Canadian Jewish Literature Award and Barwin's book here. PennSound's Gary Barwin author page — which is home to recordings spanning more than a quarter century, including a compact and useful "Selected Works 1994 – 2012," broken down by performance and text type — can be found here.