Brock professor and author Gregory Betts has been shortlisted for a pair of national literary prizes.

The associate professor of English Language and Literature at Brock is one of four finalists for the Gabrielle Roy Prize (English Section) for the best book on Canadian literature for his book, Avant-Garde Canadian Literature: The Early Manifestations.

Avant-Garde Canadian Literature (University of Toronto Press 2013)

The award, presented by the Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures (ACQL), honours the best work of Canadian literary criticism published in English.

The winner will be announced at Congress 2014 at Brock University on May 24 at the Gabrielle Roy Prize reception at the ACQL annual conference.

Betts, who is also director of Brock’s Centre for Canadian Studies, is also one of a dozen authors in the running for this year’s Carter V. Cooper Prize.

He was nominated for a science-fiction short story of his, which is a conceptual imagining of the apocalypse based on the Planck — the smallest unit of time.

The award, presented by ELQ Magazine (Exile: the Literary Quarterly), will be announced at the end of this month.