Cooking Tips for Desperate Fishwives: An Island Memoir by Margot Fedoruk (Heritage House Publishing) won a silver in the Culinary Narrative category at the 2023 Taste Canada Awards.
On Oct. 30, Taste Canada announced the winners of the 26th annual prizes during a soirée at the Fairmont Royal York in Toronto, hosted by Ali Hassan. The shortlists were announced in June, listing finalists in five categories in both French and English. Taste Canada is Canada’s only national, bilingual food writing awards.
Cooking Tips for Desperate Fishwives has been featured in the Jewish Independent(jewishindependent.ca/reading-expands-experience), Stir Vancouver, Winnipeg Free Press, BC BookWorldand other outlets. Fedoruk participated in the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival in February 2023.
Part love story, part survival story, part meditation on family dysfunction, Fedoruk’s offbeat memoir chronicles the unpredictable life of a young wife and mother on a tiny BC island.
True to its title, the memoir is infused with recipes, from the hearty Eastern European fare of Margot’s childhood to more adventurous coastal BC cuisine. The narrative follows 23-year-old Margot when she left Winnipeg and her volatile Slavic-Jewish family for the wilds of British Columbia and fell in love with a sea urchin diver. Determined not to repeat the same mistakes as she had witnessed during her parents’ marriage, Margot paints a portrait of a modern-day fishwife left behind to keep the home fires burning.
Fedoruk is a writer, book reviewer and entrepreneur, whose work has been published in the Globe and Mail, Quill & Quire, BC BookWorld, Ormbsy Review and Portal. She holds a BA from the University of Winnipeg and a BA from Vancouver Island University, where she majored in creative writing. She was awarded the Barry Broadfoot Award for creative nonfiction and journalism and a Meadowlarks Award for fiction, both from Vancouver Island University.
Visit heritagehouse.ca for more information about Cooking Tips for Desperate Fishwives, Fedoruk or Heritage House. For more details about the Taste Canada Awards, visit tastecanada.org.
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Western arts correspondent for the Globe and Mail Marsha Lederman received the Excellence in Arts and Culture Reporting Award for the article “U.S.-style book bans could happen in Canada too, if we’re not careful,” or “Arts in the Crosshairs,” at the 2023 Webster Awards.
The winners in the 14 categories of the 2023 Webster Awards were announced Nov. 15 during a live in-person event hosted by CHEK TV’s Paul Haysom and Gloria Macarenko from CBC Radio, who also conducted a fireside chat with the featured guest, veteran anchor/journalist Lisa LaFlamme. To see who the finalists and winners were of the 2023 Webster Awards, and to view the finalists’ work, visit jackwebster.com.