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Prince George author runner-up for national book prize

Night Watch: The Vet Suite is made up of three novellas centred around the author’s background of growing up as the child of a rural veterinarian.
gillianwigmore
Gillian Wigmore.

Prince George author Gillian Wigmore has won the runner up prize for The Danuta Gleed Literary Award for her book Night Watch: The Vet Suite. The Danuta Gleed award celebrates a Canadian writer for the best first collection of published short fiction in the English language.

Night Watch is a beautiful anthem to the hard world of a rural veterinarian, a life of muscle and blood and guts, all detailed by Gillian Wigmore with surprising delicacy and lyricism," the selection jury wrote about Night Watch. "These moving stories make poetic the mountains and gravel roads, the headlights at night and C-sections in doomed barns, the calves and donkeys and horses and otters, the miracles and casualties during nights without sleep. The book is intimate, superb.”

Night Watch: The Vet Suite is made up of three novellas centred around the author’s background of growing up as the child of a rural veterinarian. Wigmore’s vets struggle to stay awake during unending calving seasons, reaching for moments of stillness and grace between phone calls and farm calls; they balance their own family’s births and deaths with shepherding animals through caesareans and euthanasia, covering miles of road in their vast jurisdictions during harsh winters and muddy, ruthless springs. 

Wigmore is also the author of three books of poetry, (most recently Orient, Brick Books, 2014) a novella, (Grayling, Mother Tongue Publishing, 2014) and a novel (Glory, Invisible Publishing, 2017).