Author Bio
• Birth—1980
• Where—Meadowville, Nova Scotia, Canada
• Education—B.A., University of Toronto; M.A., Concordia
University; Ph.D. candidate, Universite de Montreal.
• Awards—Scotiabank Giller Prize
• Currently—Montreal, Quebec
Johanna Skibsrud is the author of The Sentimentalists, winner of the 2010 Scotiabank Giller Prize, Canada’s most prestigious literary award. Her other books include the poetry collections Late Nights with Wild Cowboys (shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award) and I Do Not Think That I Could Love a Human Being. She lives in Montreal.
Skibsrud's Giller win also focused attention on the struggles of small press publishers. The book had been originally published by Gaspereau Press, a boutique firm based in Nova Scotia which is one of Canada's only book publishing companies that still binds and prints its own books, with the result that the firm had difficulty meeting the increased demand after Skibsrud's win was announced. Chapters-Indigo, Canada's primary bookstore chain, did not have a single copy of the book in stock anywhere in Canada in the entire week of the Giller announcement.
However, the paper book's unavailability resulted in a significant increase in ebook sales; the ebook version of the novel quickly became the top-selling title for Kobo devices. The company subsequently announced that it had sold the novel's trade paperback rights to Douglas & McIntyre, while it will continue to print a smaller run of the novel's original edition for book collectors. W.W. Norton & Company is the book's U.S. publisher. (From the publishers and Wikipedia.)