About Mercury

The Mercury Press publishes poetry, fiction, murder mysteries, and culturally significant non-fiction by Canadian authors. E-mail us at contact@themercurypress.ca. The Mercury Press is dedicated to continuing the development of our essential mandate, the publication and dissemination of innovative Canadian fiction and poetry, which we believe rivals anything being written in English in the world today. The publisher gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Ontario Media Development Corporation's Book Fund, and the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit Program. The publisher further acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Department of Canadian Heritage's Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for our publishing activities.

HIGHLIGHTS

• In 2005, Rachel Zolf's Masque was shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry.
• In 2001, Michael Delisle's The Sailor's Disquiet (translated from the French by Gail Scott) was nominated for the Governor General's Literary Award for Translation.
• In 2000, Judy MacDonald's Jane was shortlisted for the Rogers' Writers' Trust Fiction Prize.
• In 1999, Sally Ito's Floating Shore was shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Award for Short Fiction, and won the Howard O'Hagan Award for best book of short fiction in Alberta.
• In 1998, Sandra Shamas' A Trilogy of Performances was nominated for the Governor General's Award for Drama and for the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour; Steven Ross Smith's Lures was shortlisted for the Saskatoon Book Award; John Worsley Simpson's Undercut was nominated for the Arthur Ellis Award from the Crime Writers of Canada; and Robert Majzels' City of Forgetting was shortlisted for QSPELL's Hugh MacLennan Award for Fiction.
• In 1997, The Mercury Press was nominated for Publisher of the Year by the Canadian Booksellers' Association.
• This publishing house has won many design awards, including the Alcuin and New York Design Awards, a tradition which has continued with several Alcuin Citations for excellence in design, including The Concrete Air (1997), 1988: Selected Poems and Texts (1990), Sweetgrass II (1991), and Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence (1992), as well as three citations in 1994 alone, for Wisteria, Storm Dancer, and Truth: A Book of Fictions.
• In 1999, we received Alcuin Citations for She Would Be the First Sentence of My Next Novel and Into the Peculiar Dark.
• In 1996, Terry Watada's A Thousand Homes was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award from the League of Canadian Poets.
• In 1995, No Blood Relative, by Terry Carroll, and Deadly by Nature, by Meredith Andrew, were shortlisted for the Crime Writers of Canada's Arthur Ellis Awards.
• In 1994, both of our debut Midnight Originals series novels, The Bloody Man, by Bevan Amberhill (which made the Globe & Mail's Bestseller list), and Dead and Living, by Jane Bow, were shortlisted for the Crime Writers of Canada's Arthur Ellis Awards. Carol Malyon's If I Knew I'd Tell You was shortlisted for the Smithbooks/Books in Canada Best First Novel Award.
• In 1993, Di Brandt's mother, not mother was shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Award, and Sarah Murphy's The Deconstruction of Wesley Smithson was nominated for the Alberta Writers' Guild Short Fiction Award. Anne Dandurand, on the basis of her only novel, The Cracks, which the press published in English translation, was named one of the top ten Canadian novelists under the age of 45 by Quill & Quire.
• In 1992, Carol Malyon's The Edge of the World was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book.
• In 1991, Cary Fagan's City Hall & Mrs. God was a finalist for the City of Toronto Book Award, and Kenneth J. Harvey's Directions for an Opened Body was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book. Judith Fitzgerald's Rapturous Chronicles was nominated for a Governor General's Award.
• In fall, 1996, Les Editions Balzac of Montreal published a French edition of Julian Samuel's Passage to Lahore, and in 1997 Balzac published the French edition of Robert Richard's A Johnny Novel.
• "Nobody Wears Orange", by Marg Wilson, from Consider the Hollyhocks, was made into a television program in The Spoken Arts series for BRAVO.
• Our crime and murder mystery series, Midnight Originals-- novels set in Canada and featuring Canadian characters and situations-- have focused on local geography, theatre, royalty-in-Canada, issues of ecology, and, in two titles, serious examinations of Canadian justice issues. Both The Running Girl and Millicent: A Mystery, have been optioned for film; Howard Engel is writing Millicent's screenplay.

ROLE IN CANADIAN PUBLISHING

    The Mercury Press is a member in good standing of the Association of Canadian Publishers, Ontario Book Publishers Organization, and the Literary Press Group.

A BRIEF HISTORY

    On January 1, 1990, Aya Press was renamed The Mercury Press. "Mercury" was both a messenger and the god of eloquence; the word also means "signpost." In the late 1920s, F.R. Scott, Leo Kennedy and others founded an early modernist journal in Montreal called The Canadian Mercury, which published the work of Stephen Leacock and Dorothy Livesay as well as many others. This eclecticism is in keeping with the intentions of the press, as is the commitment to Canadian tradition and experiment.