Montreal author Heather O’Neill wins $10,000 Danuta Gleed Literary Award

TORONTO – Montreal author Heather O’Neill has added to her growing list of accolades as winner of the $10,000 Danuta Gleed Literary Award.

The award-winning novelist was recognized for her short-story collection “Daydreams of Angels” (HarperCollins) at a ceremony in Toronto on Friday night. The prize honours the best first collection of short fiction by a Canadian author published in 2015 in the English language.

“Daydreams of Angels” was also shortlisted for last year’s Giller Prize, and O’Neill was also a 2014 Giller finalist for her novel “The Girl Who Was Saturday Night.”

O’Neill received international acclaim for her 2006 debut novel “Lullabies for Little Criminals,” which won CBC’s “Canada Reads” contest and the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction. The novel was also shortlisted for both the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Orange Prize for Fiction.

Jury members Shauna Singh Baldwin, Barry Dempster and Dora Dueck lauded “Daydreams of Angels” as “a fanciful, fantastical collection of post-modern fairy tales.”

Runners-up for the prize were Toronto’s Kevin Hardcastle for “Debris” (Biblioasis) and Peterborough, Ont.-based writer Andrew Forbes for “What You Need” (Invisible Publishing). They each received $500.

Last month’s short list also included Toronto-based Hugh Graham for “Last Words” (Exile Editions) and Fredericton-based Irish writer Gerard Beirne for “In a Time of Drought and Hunger” (Oberon Press).

The award was created in honour of the late writer Danuta Gleed, who received several prizes for her short fiction before her death in December 1996.