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Frying Plantain is cooking up cold cash for first time author  Toronto's Zalika Reid-Benta by Stephen Weir Two Days in June. Two $10,000 prizes.  Last month young Zalika Reid-Benta won two different literary Prizes in the space of two days!  On June 25th her book, Frying Plantain won the $10,000 Kobo Emerging Writer’s Literary Fiction Prize.  The day before it was announced that she had won the  Writers’ Union of Canada’s annual   $10.000 Danuta Gleed Literary Award. Zalika Reid-Benta, a Toronto-based Jamaican Canadian novelist, burst onto the literary scene last year when the House of Anansi Press published her first book.  Her debut story collection Frying Plantain is a series of linked short tales centering on the coming of age of Kara Davis, a young Jamaican Canadian girl growing up in “Little Jamaica” (the Eglinton West neighbourhood in Toronto.) Kara is caught in the middle between her Canadian identity and her de...

Stories from Little Jamaica earn Toronto writer a place  on Kobo’s Emerging Writer Prize Short List Another week, another Caribbean Canadian author has been nominated for a top national literary prize. Zalika Reid-Benta,  a Toronto-based Jamaican Canadian novelist has made the longlist for the Sixth Annual Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize. She is in the running for the $10,000 prize for literary fiction for her book  Frying Plantain  was published last year and nominated for the 2019 Giller Prize, Canada’s most prestigious award.    Since then it has won the 2019 Byblacks People’s Choice Awards for Best Author and has been nominated for the Ontario Library Association’s 2020 Forest of Reading Evergreen Award and The Canadian Writers’ Union Danuta Gleed Literary Award. Rakuten Kobo, the Toronto based global eBook and audiobook online seller will be announcing the winners of the Emerging Writer Prize in June. It recognizes exceptional...