PEN International Announces Shortlist for New Voices Award

Claire Battershill’s The Collective Name for Ninjas Shortlisted for New Voices Award

On August 22nd, PEN International announced its inaugural New Voices Award shortlist. Claire Battershill, author of The Collective Name for Ninjas, has been shortlisted for the award and has been invited to read her work at the 79th annual PEN International Congress in Reykjavík.

Claire-Battershill,
Claire Battershill

Claire Battershill won the 2008 CBC Literary Award for Short Fiction for the title story from her debut collection, Circus, and was recently named the co-winner of the 2013 Canadian Authors Association’s Emerging Writer Award. She was a Junior Fellow and apprentice printer at Massey College, and, in 2008, she was a research assistant for Margaret Atwood’s Massey Lectures, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth. Claire has a PhD in English Literature and Book History, and has taught English and Creative Writing at the University of Toronto and the Ontario College of Art and Design. Born in Dawson Creek, B.C., in 1986, she has lived in Vancouver, Victoria, and Toronto. She now lives in London, England, where she teaches at the University of Reading.

Congratulations to Claire Battershill! We wish her the best of luck in Reykjavík.

Photographer unknown, retrieved from http://canadianauthors.org/conference/caa-emerging-writer-award/.