We realize that lately, we've allowed this section of the website to become dominated by bulletin after bulletin about book prizes and shortlists and various literary honours. But what can we say? It's awards season, people, and NeWest Press is lucky enough to be in the running for several of them.

We're especially thrilled by our strong showing in the list of nominees for the Alberta Book Publishing Awards. We're contenders in five categories:

• Rosie Chard's memorably titled debut novel Seal Intestine Raincoat is up for Book of the Year (Trade Fiction);

• 14 Tractors, the innovatively designed book from Regina's Gerald Hill, is up for Book of the Year (Poetry);

• our brilliant designer Natalie Olsen is vying for two different awards: her striking cover for Don Hunter's Incident at Willow Creek is up for Best Book Cover/Jacket Design; and her painstaking work on Erín Moure's My Beloved Wager is up for Best Book Design;

• and last but not least, NeWest Press itself is one of the two nominees for Publisher of the Year.

All this comes on top of the good news about the Alberta Literary Awards, where Michael Davie's novel Fishing for Bacon and Gordon Pengilly's play Seeing in the Dark are both nominees. To put all of this in a nutshell: hooray us.

(A quick note of explanation: the Alberta Book Publishing Awards are handed out by the Book Publishers Association of Alberta, while the Alberta Literary Awards are the provenance of the Writers Guild of Alberta. However, this year, both sets of prizes will be handed out at the same ceremony, which takes place on May 14 at the Delta South Hotel in Edmonton. They'll also be announcing the winner of the Alberta Readers' Choice Award at the Delta South that night — the ARC Award being the creation of the BPAA and the Edmonton Public Library. Hmmm... we have a sneaking feeling that our "note of explanation" only made things more confusing than ever.)