Peter Behren's Governor-General's Award-winning novel The Law of Dreams and Rawi Hage's acclaimed DeNiro's Game are among the finalists for this year's Writers' Trust Fiction Prize.

Candidates for the Writers' Trust Prize, its non-fiction equivalent and the Journey Prize for short fiction were announced Tuesday in Toronto.

Author Peter Behrens imagined his great-grandfather's fortunes during the Irish potato famine in his first novel, The Law of Dreams.Author Peter Behrens imagined his great-grandfather's fortunes during the Irish potato famine in his first novel, The Law of Dreams.
(House of Anansi/Groundwood Books)

The other candidates for the $15,000 fiction prize are:

  • Catherine Hanrahan of Vancouver for Lost Girls and Love Hotels, about a young Canadian woman who is trying to escape her past in Tokyo, until she finds herself fascinated by the story of a missing girl.
  • Kenneth J. Harvey of Burnt Head, N.L., for Inside, about a man who returns to St. John's after a stint in prison and tries to rebuild his life.
  • Mary Lawson of Kingston-upon-Thames, U.K., for The Other Side of the Bridge, about two generations in an Ontario farm family.

Behrens, a Maine-based screenwriter, imagined the adventures of his great-grandfather during the Irish potato famine in his first novel The Law of Dreams.

Lebanese-born Montrealer Hage was nominated for the Giller Prize and Governor-General's Award and won the both the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and the McAuslan First Book Prize for DeNiro's Game.

It is a first novel about two friends who go their separate ways during the conflict in Lebanon.

The nominees for the $15,000 Nereus Writers' Trust Prize for Non-Fiction include memoirs from acclaimed author Rudy Wiebe and former vet Barbara Kingscote.

The finalists are:

  • Charlotte Gray of Ottawa for Reluctant Genius: The Passionate Life and Inventive Mind of Alexander Graham Bell, about the imaginative inventor and his wife Mabel Hubbard.
  • Barbara Kingscote of Innisfail, Alta., for Ride the Rising Wind: One Woman's Journey Across Canada, a memoir of her own 1949 journey on horseback from Quebec to the West Coast.
  • Noah Richler of Toronto for This Is My Country, What's Yours? A Literary Atlas of Canada, a cultural portrait of Canada created by talking with its very diverse community of authors.
  • Dragan Todorovic of Coventry, U.K., for The Book of Revenge: A Blues for Yugoslavia, a history of the Balkans after the death of Tito.
  • Rudy Wiebe of Edmonton, for Of This Earth: A Mennonite Boyhood in the Boreal Forest, a memoir of a 1930s Mennonite farming community by the two-time Governor General's Award-winning novelist.

The nominees for the $2,000 Journey Prize are Heather Birrell of Toronto for BriannaSusannaAlana, Lee Henderson of Vancouver for Conjugation and Martin West of Calgary for Cretacea.

Last year's winner of the fiction prize was Joseph Boyden for Three Day Road and the non-fiction prize went to John Vaillant for The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness and Greed.