Rakuten Kobo / Writers’ Union: Two Literary Prizes won by Zalika In Two Days
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 desire to be a “true” Jamaican. She lives throu