She has been longlisted for the 2024 CBC Non-Fiction Literary Prize for her lyric essay, The Sensibilities of Dogs.
“I wrote the essay during the tumultuous times of the pandemic when, confronted by the vagaries of life, I considered the tenuous grip the human condition has on its reality. Memories were triggered, and The Sensibilities of Dogs resulted from this introspection on the fragmentation of memory, person and place following traumatic loss.”
The piece also received the 2024 Jon Whyte Memorial Award, sponsored by the Haynes family and presented by the Writers’ Guild of Alberta.
Antoinette is an emerging writer writing from the prairies of Alberta. Her experiences as an immigrant and her profession as a psychiatrist inform her writing. As an artist, she writes in an attempt to make sense of displacement, what it means to be an immigrant, and the social selves we present to the world, whether as a survival mechanism or a function of social conditioning. She offers social commentary through a satirical voice and attempts to illuminate the absurdity of the human condition.
She started her writing career four years ago, and has completed the Creative Writing Certificate at the University of Calgary. She will complete her MFA in Fiction through the University of King's College (Halifax) in 2025.
Her work has been published, shortlisted, longlisted, honourably mentioned, and provincially awarded. And rejected, that too.
She shares her home with two saintly horses, two busy Goldendoodles, and one husband. Her town boasts the biggest teepee in the world, the best tomatoes in Canada, and hardly any traffic jams.