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Katherin Edwards Wins the Malahat's 2017 Far Horizons Award for Fiction

Congratulations to Katherin Edwards, who has won this year's Far Horizons Award for Fiction with her short story, "Faster Horses"! For her literary achievements, Edwards wins the $1,000 prize and publication in Issue #201.

The Far Horizons Award celebrates the achievement of emerging writers who have yet to publish their fiction in book form.

Here's what contest judge Steven Price had this to say about Edwards' winning piece: "Sometimes a story startles with its quiet profundity, how much it seems to know. Such is the case with 'Faster Horses.' Told in exquisite prose, this is a story about a man at the end of his life, as he is taken by his wife and daughter on a last drive up into the hills near his house. Sam McKenzie, who 'feels like a broken promise,' recognizes in the opening paragraph how 'the body stops in increments, wears out like cheap clothes.' And yet, while ostensibly a story about dying, what unfolds instead is a story about living — the impossibilities, the regrets, the joys in a life. And the drive itself blurs into a kind of myth: a journey both literal and figurative, a journey forward into death, and backward, into memory. 'Faster Horses' has passages of aching beauty, but what haunted me most is the hard clear handling of its protagonist's inner life, its refusal of the sentimental, and how all this is set against a delicate portrait of a person not yet prepared to give up on life. This is a beautiful work of fiction."

Katherin Edwards

Photo credit: Donna Kane

Katherin Edwards, former racehorse groom, is also a graduate of UVic and UBC. Winner at Eden Mills for poetry, her work has been published in The Malahat Review, TNQ and ARC magazine, as well as in chapbook form at JackPine Press. Her most recent creative nonfiction is in the anthology In This Together (Brindle and Glass).

Read an interview with Katherin Edwards on her winning story!

Steven PriceSteven Price is the author of By Gaslight (2016), longlisted for the Giller Prize, and Into that Darkness (2011), shortlisted for the Ethel Wilson Award. He is also the author of two collections of poetry, Anatomy of Keys (2006), winner of the Gerald Lampert Award, and Omens in the Year of the Ox (2012), winner of the ReLit Award. He lives in Victoria, B.C.

We would also like to congratulate this year's finalists:

Barry Grenon, "Natural Born Killers"
Victoria Hamilton, "Little Creatures"
Elaine Hayes, "Monica's Dancing"
Pamela Hensley, "Manny's Bar"
Cody Klippenstein, "Becoming"
Helen Polychronakos, "Crow / Bride"
Kyle Schoenfeld, "Three Birds"
Yilin Wang, "Drifters"

Previous Prize Winners