Marion Quednau on ReLit Shortlist

Sunshine Coast author Marion Quednau has been recognized for her latest book by the ReLit Awards. Sunday Drive to Gunclub Road is on the shortlist in the 2022 Short Fiction category.

The ReLit Awards are given to books published by independent presses and they represent the very best of Canadian literature published in a given year. Shortlists and winners in three categories—Poetry, Short Fiction and Novels—are made public throughout the month of May.

Sunday Drive to Gunclub Road is Marion Quednau’s first collection of stories in which she offers unsettling examinations of “what really happened” with rich, complex characters that might equally arouse our suspicions or sympathy. Rob Thomas, of Broken Pencil Magazine, writes that the stories “make you feel a part of an inside joke [...] You feel like an accessory in the hardships and narrow escapes, a secret confidant to the characters’ intimacies.” The title story in Sunday Drive to Gunclub Road was shortlisted for the Carter V Cooper Award in 2019 and appeared in the CVC9 Anthology in 2020.

Marion Quednau has won numerous awards for both her fiction and her poetry, including a National Magazine Award, and the People’s Choice Award when shortlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize. Her fiction has received critical acclaim, the SmithBooks/Books in Canada First Novel Award, when the late Mordecai Richler judged the writing in The Butterfly Chair to be “imaginative and informed by intelligence.” Quednau’s short fiction has appeared in a variety of literary magazines and has won kudos in competition. She lives on the Sunshine Coast, BC.