Award History
2015 Winner
Writers’ Trust Engel Findley AwardJury Citation
“Annabel Lyon’s fiction has an extraordinary compressed force. Her writing is taut and precise, yet charged with emotion and meaning. It’s hard-headed and hard-edged, but also wonderfully visceral. Lyon makes a high art of the understatement.
Lyon’s range is remarkable. Her novellas stretch the margins of the form. The three stories she delivers in one volume have the separate force of novels, each one a formal experiment that takes us into a different period with its sensibility and cultural particularity. Her historical novels are fresh, even audacious; in her hands, Aristotle and his contemporaries gain living flesh — as fathers, as rivals, as sometimes brutish and ignorant, as people with failing bodies and working kitchens. The wild violence of the period is unflinchingly documented.
These are books distinguished by wit, note-perfect dialogue, and a trenchant grasp of history. We look forward eagerly to the next.”
— 2015 Writers’ Trust Engel/Findley Award Jury (David Chariandy, Russell Smith, Joan Thomas)
Selected Works
The Sweet Girl
Jury Citation
“Annabel Lyon’s Aristotle is the most fully-realized historical character in contemporary fiction. The Golden Mean engenders in the reader the same helpless sensitivity to the ferocious beauty of the world that is Aristotle’s disease. In this alarmingly confident and transporting debut novel, Lyon offers us that rarest of treats: a book about philosophy, about the power of ideas, that chortles and sings like an earthy romance.” — 2009 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize Jury (Marina Endicott, Miriam Toews, and R.M. Vaughan)