<\/p>\n\n\n\n
November 2024 – There Is No Blue<\/em><\/strong> wins the Hilary Weston Writers\u2019 Trust Prize for Nonfiction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Prize for Nonfiction is given annually for excellence in the category of literary nonfiction, which includes essays, history, biography, memoir, commentary, and criticism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n See website here >><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n – – – – Martha discusses mental illness, authorial responsibility, and the way every memoir is an act of imagination.<\/p>\n See the article here >><\/a><\/p>\n – – – –<\/p>\n The Toronto Star<\/a> asks Martha what the Trillium Book Award<\/strong> nomination means for Sister Language.<\/em><\/p>\n Reviews<\/strong>:<\/p>\n The Malahat Review<\/span>\u00a0 ” …\u00a0a guided walk through the creative archives of two writers, with the bonus of listening to them discuss their doubts and discoveries in loving and copious detail.”<\/p>\n \u2014 Tanis MacDonald Martha and her sister’s book is so remarkable and, that rarest of things, original. It seems to be what Virginia Woolf called “a conversation into posterity.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2014 Howard Norman<\/p>\n In Sister Language, Christina Baillie writes, LANGUAGE BELIEVES IN THE PATIENT\u2019S REAL EXISTENCE, but this book makes clear that she and her sister Martha believe that language can also be a place of play, trust, exploration, great tenderness and the profound expression of the strangeness, pain and beauty of having a life.<\/p>\n This intimate and attentive correspondence between these two sisters who are both writers is an ode to relationship, understanding, communication, love, and trust as well as the possibilities and negotiations of disability, sisterhood and a life lived through language. This is a remarkable and moving epistolary novel that thinks deeply about what writing is and what it means to share both writing and one\u2019s self.<\/p>\n \u2014 Gary Barwin<\/p>\n Christina chose to take her own life. What she has left behind is an invaluable document testifying to the creativity and profound poetic sensitivity of her life and work. The last line of the book, repeated from an earlier letter and addressed to her younger sister, takes the form of a question. \u201cMartha, Martha, do you? See?\u201d As a result of the courage and clarity of this startling work, we are privileged to be granted insight, understanding, and appreciation.<\/p>\n \u2014 Steven W. Beattie There is something in this book that can\u2019t be contained, that can\u2019t be held on a page, even if it is \u201conly\u201d language. Even if it\u2019s only made out of words. There\u2019s something unbound, something wild, and an unexpected tenderness in the midst of that wildness. To be invited to witness, to be allowed to share the experience of these two sisters in the playground of this book, it feels so rare. I want to say thank you to Martha for making the impossible necessary, for taking the risk, for keeping faith, for answering the call.<\/p>\n \u2014 Mike Hoolboom – – – –<\/p>\n The Toronto Star –\u00a0Trevor Corkum<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n “Martha Baillie fans, rejoice. If Clara<\/strong> finds Baillie at the top of her game with this complex, deftly layered new novel, her sixth.” \u00a0See review >><\/a><\/p>\n Quill & Quire – Shazia Hafiz Ramji<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n “… Like Muriel Barbery and Enrique Vila-Matas, writers who are steeped in eccentric characters and literary metafiction across generations, Baillie’s novel will appeal to many and please the literary-minded too.” \u00a0See review >><\/a><\/p>\n – – – –<\/p>\n Alice Zeniter<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n \u00ab Formidable roman. (…) La traduction r\u00e9v\u00e8le son extr\u00eame qualit\u00e9 : Paule Noyart traduit ce roman, qui bascule de la minutie du travail d\u2019archive \u00e0 l\u2019extraordinaire fracas des glaciers qui avalent le temps, avec une pr\u00e9cision que j\u2019admire. La beaut\u00e9 concise de certaines phrases arr\u00eate net la lecture. \u00bb<\/p>\n \u201cTerrific novel. (\u2026) The translation reveals its exceptional quality: Paule Noyart translates this novel, which swings between the minutia of archival work and the extraordinary crashing of glaciers swallowing time, with a precision I admire. The concise beauty of certain sentences stops you in your tracks.\u201d<\/p>\n And ..<\/p>\n Fr\u00e9d\u00e9rique Fanchette, Lib\u00e9ration<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n \u00ab Le lecteur \u00e0 la suite de l\u2019enqu\u00eatrice lit des choses qui ne lui sont pas destin\u00e9es, le \u00ab je \u00bb de Schl\u00f6gel prend corps et se d\u00e9robe en m\u00eame temps. Dans sa fuite, le h\u00e9ros a toujours un temps d\u2019avance. C\u2019est le charme de ce roman dont les bas de page sont occup\u00e9s par les nombreuses notes de l\u2019archiviste et de la traductrice, \u00e0 simple, double et triple ast\u00e9risques, comme autant d\u2019empreintes animales dans la neige. \u00bb<\/p>\n – – – –<\/p>\n \u00a0In her comprehensive review for Brick<\/a>, Kate Caley finds an \u201cethics of memory\u201d in Martha\u2019s work.<\/p>\n – – – –<\/p>\n Martha’s work Topographies<\/em>\u00a0chosen by The Iowa Review – one of the oldest literary journals in the US. \u00a0Details here >><\/a><\/p>\n – – – –<\/p>\n Martha Baillie’s installation of The Schlogel Archive, based on her novel on the mysterious disappearance of a young German man on Baffin Island …. see the article.<\/a><\/p>\n – – – –<\/p>\n Quebec publisher, Lemeac, will be publishing The Search for Heinrich Schlogel in french. Award winning translator, Paule Noyart, will do the translation.<\/p>\n – – – –<\/p>\n The Literary Review of Canada:\u00a0Revealing, puzzling, dazzling, The Search For Heinrich Schl\u00f6gel resists reduction, rewards rereading.<\/a><\/p>\n Martha Baillie listed as one of nine great Canadian contemporary writers<\/a>, for The Search For Heinrich Schl\u00f6gel.<\/p>\n \u201cMartha Baillie has written a timeless masterpiece. Every page is full of haunting wonderment. Truly, I know of no novel quite like it\u2014it\u2019s a blessing. The Search for Heinrich Schl\u00f6gel has dreamlike locutions, it tells the most unusual tale, and it brings the margins of the world to us with photographic immediacy. I was completely transported.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2014 Howard <\/strong>Norman<\/strong>, author of Next Life Might Be Kinder<\/em><\/p>\n “Baillie delivers a work of magical realism that captures the experience of postcolonial guilt … and gives voice to a silenced past.”<\/p>\n \u2014 Starred and boxed Publishers Weekly<\/p>\n “The Search for Heinrich Schl\u00f6gel is utterly distinctive, a fictional biography that drifts so imperceptibly into dream that it’s impossible to tell where the reality of it ends and the fantasy begins. There’s something of Nabokov here, and also something of Rip Van Winkle. Baillie has written an ode to those things that resist time, like a photograph, and those things that relinquish themselves to it, like a painting, resulting in a novel that is itself a little bit of both.”<\/p>\n \u2014 Kevin Brockmeier<\/strong>, author of The Illumination<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cCapacious, capricious, mischievous, The Search for Heinrich Schl\u00f6gel moves like a quantum experiment, defying boundaries of time, place, chronology. Fluid as light itself, animated by startling imagery, vivid and peculiar characters, The Search for Heinrich Schl\u00f6gel is a hymn to brooding memory, the enduring need to inhabit story, and a haunting insistence upon endless possibilities within possibility. That is to say, hope.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2014 Gina Ochsner<\/strong>, author of The Russian Dreambook of Color<\/em> and Flight<\/em><\/p>\n “Martha Baillie\u2019s extraordinary The Search for Heinrich Schl\u00f6gel is not quite like any other book I\u2019ve read. It invites us on a hallucinatory journey to the Arctic and through time. It asks us to live with mystery and wonder, which is what a work of art does. If it reminds me of anything, it is the fabulous, shape-shifting novels of the Icelandic writer Sj\u00f3n.”<\/p>\n \u2014 Catherine Bush<\/strong>, author of The Rules of Engagement<\/em> and Accusation<\/em><\/p>\n “How is it possible to find a person who doesn\u2019t know he’s missing? How can we be entangled in the world, in history, and live a moral life? Heinrich Schl\u00f6gel doesn’t give up his secrets easily, but as time collapses and opens, an extraordinary person, and an astonishing reading experience, come into existence. Martha Baillie\u2019s new novel is entirely original, remembered yet created, truthful yet fictional, old, alive and visionary.”<\/p>\n \u2014 Madeleine Thien<\/strong>, author of Dogs at the Perimeter<\/em><\/p>\n ”\u00a0… a philosophic, absorbing read on photography, the North, colonialism, ethnography, and the nature of time.” \u00a0 \u00a0more<\/a> ><\/p>\n \u2014\u00a0The Globe & Mail<\/strong><\/p>\n “A ghostly voice telling the tale of a missing man who fell through a hole in time, the archivist shimmers mysteriously, an apparition whose full story we cannot know.” \u00a0more<\/a> ><\/p>\n —\u00a0Brett Josef Grubisic<\/strong>, National Post<\/p>\n Chosen as Globe & Mail’s\u00a0Jade Colbert\u2019s 5 favourite small press books of the year\u00a0 \u00a0more<\/a>\u00a0><\/p>\n Top Pick for 2014 – Quill & Quire. \u00a0 more<\/a> ><\/p>\n – – – –<\/p>\n “…it\u2019s a book lover\u2019s book, a library patron\u2019s book, a book of a thousand books, a book that is open to the world, no matter what world we come from.”<\/em><\/p>\n Read the recommendation.<\/a><\/p>\n – – – –<\/p>\n Read their blog posting here<\/a>.<\/p>\n – – – –<\/p>\n Six Canadian authors were chosen by\u00a0 bookstore staff who posted video<\/a> promotions for their favorites.\u00a0 The reading public cast their votes, and The Incident Report won<\/a>!<\/p>\n – – – –<\/p>\n Martha Baillie’s Incident Report is chosen for the Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist; one of 12 Canadian authors up for the prize.<\/p>\n – – – –<\/p>\n Canada Also Reads: The Longlist<\/strong>;\u00a0 nominates The Incident Report<\/em>.\u00a0 This new ‘longlist’ is The Afterword’s<\/a> shadow competition to the CBC’s yearly Canada Reads Competition.<\/p>\n – – – –<\/p>\n The Incident Report<\/em> <\/strong>chosen for The Globe And Mail’s 12th annual pick of the 100 best and most influential books of the year<\/a>.<\/p>\n – – – –<\/p>\n Steph Vandermeulen<\/a><\/strong> nominates The Incident Report<\/strong><\/em> for Keep Toronto Reading: see YouTube review<\/a>.<\/p>\n – – – –<\/p>\n “A beautiful derangement. Martha Bailie’s novel references everything from Satie’s Variations to the Brothers Grimm. Along the way, it offers readers the utter virtues of getting completely lost.”<\/p>\n “Baillie is a subtle portraitist and creates an engaging heroine with rich psychological nuance.”<\/p>\n “Baillie’s unsettling dreamscape … seems to speak to a host of unsaid violations… But all is not darkness. The Incident Report is also very funny.”<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\nInterview: \u00a0Electric Lit:<\/h3>\n
Sister Language<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Read the full review >><\/a><\/p>\n
More at That Shakespearean Rag >><\/a><\/p>\n
More at Mike Hoolbloom >><\/a><\/p>\nPraise for If Clara<\/em><\/strong><\/h3>\n
Sales soar of translated\u00a0Search For Heinrich Schl\u00f6gel<\/em><\/strong><\/em>,\u00a0following review<\/a> in Le Monde:<\/strong><\/h3>\n
BRICK reviews The Search For Heinrich Schl\u00f6gel<\/em>:<\/strong><\/h3>\n
The Iowa Review:<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Toronto Star discovers The Schlogel Archive at Koffler:<\/strong><\/h3>\n
The Search For Heinrich Schl\u00f6gel – in French:<\/em><\/strong><\/h3>\n
Praise for The Search For Heinrich Schl\u00f6gel<\/span>:<\/em><\/strong><\/h3>\n
Lists:<\/strong><\/h3>\n
The 49th Shelf<\/a>, Recommends The Incident Report<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Tin House Press<\/a> in the USA discovers The Incident Report<\/strong><\/em><\/h3>\n
The Incident Report comes out on top in Another Story Bookshop’s competition!<\/strong><\/em><\/h3>\n
Giller Prize Longlist for the Incident Report<\/strong><\/em><\/h3>\n
Praise for The Incident Report<\/em><\/strong><\/h3>\n