Liselle Sambury had an unexpectedly great start to the day.
The Timmins author's debut book Blood Like Magic has been named a finalist for the prestigious 2021 Governor General Literary Awards. Canada Council for the Arts revealed the list of 70 books in seven categories today.
The winning books will be announced on Nov. 17, with each winner receiving $25,000. Each finalist also takes home $1,000.
“This morning I noticed my phone was buzzing a lot,” she said.
Knowing the Indigo top books of 2021 were being released today and that Blood Like Magic is featured as one of its best teen books, she thought it was for that.
“I rolled over and I looked through it and I saw the announcement. It wasn’t really something I had known ahead of time or even something I had ever been thinking about, it just kind of came as a complete surprise, but a very happy surprise — a great way to wake up," she said.
Blood Like Magic is a fantasy book about a teen witch coming into her powers and being met with a moral dilemma. It's nominated in the Young People's Literature category for the Governor General Literary Awards.
Talking hours after the news was announced, the surprise of her book being included was still sinking in.
“It’s really exciting to see the book celebrated in that way. I really just wanted to write a fun book where people could be represented. When I was a kid I couldn’t find any books where Black girls were the hero of the story and I just kind of wanted to bring that out there into a book. It was really exciting to think of people in Toronto seeing landmarks that they knew and getting to have that representation and to talk a little bit more about the history of Canada as well and that intersection with Black history," she explained.
Sambury is a Trinidadian-Canadian who grew up in Toronto.
She was working full-time in Timmins as a social media manager when she wrote the book. Feeling homesick at the time, the book is set in Toronto.
When the company in Timmins she was working for closed, Sambury headed back down south for work. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit she was laid off and moved back to Timmins where she and her partner own a house. Shortly after, she inked another book deal that allowed her to become a full-time author.
Writing as a career had always been a dream, but she didn't think it would ever be feasible.
"After I got that deal I was more willing to try it out, I think that’s kind of the strange thing about COVID. Things that you maybe didn’t see yourself doing, you’re kind of like, ‘Well I may as well try it now that the world is burning and see how it goes,’” she said.
The sequel to Blood Like Magic is slated to be released in March 2022 and will be the last book in that series.
After that, Butcherbirds is set to come out in spring 2023. That book will be set in Northern Ontario and is about a teenager confronting the ghosts of her mother's past after inheriting a mansion.
“It is a character that’s from Toronto that moves to Timmins … there are characters that are from Timmins, but I’m not doing a POV of someone that’s grown up here, I think that would be really difficult to catch on to all of those nuances. Always you feel a sense of responsibility when you’re setting something in a real place with real people, you want the people from that area to enjoy it and to be able to pick up places that they love in it,” she said.
