The winners of the Books in Canada Student Writing Awards are as follows:
1st place university/college undergraduate level: "Clever" by Rachel Li Wai Suen (York University)
2nd place university/college undergraduate level:
no second place winner chosen
Honourable mentions university/college undergraduate level: "Recipe" by S. Halldorson (University of Toronto), "Running" by Jamie Munroe (University of New Brunswick), "Accidents Make People" by Jessica Wilson (University of Toronto)

1st place high school level: "A Flying Reality" by Naomi Louder (Dawson College, Montreal)
2nd place high school level: "Star-Crossed" by Kyla Tennille Lenton (Carman Collegiate, High School, Carman, Manitoba)
Honourable mentions high school level: "Real Cane Sugar" by Sara Davis (Queen Elizabeth Park High, Oakville, Ontario), and "Godsent" by Nick Anderson (Sir Allan MacNab Secondary School, Hamilton, Ontario).

Books in Canada wishes to thank Eric McCormack, Professor at Waterloo University, and Libby Scheier of the Toronto Writing Workshop, for judging the undergraduate level entries. The winners of the high school level competition were selected by the editors of Books in Canada.

CLEVER
The prodigy didn't know her multiplication tables. Only 2 x and 3 x were adequately memorized. But above that her mind fell blank, stubborn, an unspeaking egg.
Listen, her father said. He reeled off a chant, a mantra of numbers-up and down in a high solemn voice. The manic spell of the 8 x table.
Line up, Mrs. Arena booms. All hairy mustache and lip rouge, this woman. Once she kicked over Winston's desk and hurled him out of the classroom, while the rest of the class tried to look busy cutting out paper bunnies for Easter. Mrs Arena keeps a special pair of cowboy boots in the corner cupboard, for kicking bad children. The prodigy had once seen them-long and brown and shining like a licked lip. But now it is time to line up; pale-faced, pale-haired children in a droning of anxious voices.
Recite the 6 x table starting with Jocelyn, she raps out.
6 x 1 is 6. Jocelyn is lucky and everyone hates her.
One times something is the same, the prodigy remembers. Everything happens once in a life. The numbers are running down the row, while Mrs. Arena stands with legs apart like two iron poles. She is not soft and quivering like Nana Greene who lives next door. The prodigy had gone over to visit Nana Greene when no one knew, because the prodigy's father did not like his neighbour. He must be afraid of the dog, the prodigy thinks now in a flash of insight.
6 x 6 is 36. Benjamin is the one who knows math. But, to the prodigy's scorn, he cannot even write his full name without running the `e's backward and giving the `b's three large, awkward mounds.
Nana Greene's dog is black and small with a fine brown eye on him. His name is Peanut, but he eats bananas. The prodigy fed him hers, the sliced-up bananas in a pale gold dish that Nana Greene gave her.
The home was full of beads and belljars and dishes of leftovers. Nana Greene herself smelled like something left over, or like the dentist's breath when he leans far over the prodigy and says open wide, that's a sweet girl. But Nana Greene was pink and plump and new-looking, and her hands were fat and cushiony as peonies. She lived with a thin energetic woman named Mara who wears green, and the two of them together remind the prodigy of the rhyme about the thin man and his fat wife, with the different parts of meat. Except Mara isn't exactly Nana Green's husband, so they aren't really the nursery rhyme.
Now it is time for 6 x 9. Louisa stumbles over the words, and Mrs. Arena's eyebrows twitch.
The last time the prodigy visited Nana Greene's, on the way out, Mara moistly kissed her on the cheek and said what a dear little poppet. Her odour was spicy and damp, like mossy underarms. Nana Greene gave her a branch from the pussy willow bush they had out front, and Peanut threw up on the linoleum.
The prodigy fell into that bush once. Or she was pushed. It all depends on which window you were looking from.
It was raining and she was walking home, proud of her umbrella, which was pink with Rainbow Brite on it. Martin came up behind her and said boo fraidypants.
The prodigy knows that it isn't fraidypants but fraidycat, so why did he use the other? Sometimes people call her smartypants, but not her father who says nothing when she brings home x-ed math tests.
Martin is stupid, jaw always lolling open. He is one year younger than her but bigger, as is everyone. He lives down the road, and across the park, so they walk home the same way.
Today, he says, he learned about sex from a woman who brought a dead baby in a suitcase. Now the prodigy knows he is lying, because the sex ed. teacher only goes to older grades and she doesn't bring a dead baby, it's a big plastic one and lots of little ones.
Maudie, the prodigy's older sister, had told her that and shown her secretly the tiny plastic fetus that she had stolen from the suitcase during recess. Now Maudie is in high school and re-names herself Maude, and the tiny baby hangs from her knapsack by a safety pin and a string looped through a hole Maude had drilled through its head. The prodigy's father sees this and murmurs barbaric, barbaric.
7 x 1. It isn't Jocelyn this time, lucky for her.
Martin said you kiss to have sex, and the prodigy was so astonished that she contradicted him. No you don't. You are a lying ape. But he gave her a black look and said yes, yes, you do. I'm going to kiss you. Don't be so fresh.
But did he mean fresh like Nana Greene's clean pink linen or fresh as when her father slaps the side of her head and says don't be fresh young lady?
They were passing pussy willow bush and he lunges at her, mouth open wide, a dank cavern of swallowing. The prodigy falls backward into the bush's crackling branches, her voice silent, and raises her hand, smacking him hard with the umbrella. He makes a sound of pain and she gets up and kicks him low on the leg, then runs home to sit in the bathroom and look in the mirror with the reflection's gleaming eyes, and think it's happened to me.
7 x 4 is 28, mumbles Robbie. Robbie is blind with dark lenses covering his eyes, so that no one can see them. The prodigy thinks of cooked fish eyes, or marbles, opaque and shiny, and yearns to touch Robbie's eyes. Perhaps she will ask him at recess and he will let her.
7 x 4 is 28, thinks the prodigy, but everything happens once. Maybe twice but no more. The candleholders with the silver flowers had 3 candlesticks on them, but one fell off after her mother had screamed and banged them on the floor. She was only trying to get the prodigy's father to pay attention. So now there are 2 candlesticks and a stump.
A 3 becoming a 2; the prodigy searches for a pattern. Aunt Diana had twins once, so that makes 2 children. She had another baby named Hugo, she had him first, but he couldn't think and so was put away. She had 3 children but there are really 2, said the prodigy's father.
Always reductions is how it works, thinks the prodigy. Everything brought to 1 or 2. The number 1 was the fossil of a shell imprinted in a rock that the prodigy found while digging for nothing in the yard. She put it very carefully into the toe of an old shoe for safekeeping, but forgot which one. The prodigy looked hard for another rock with a shell's print but failed, so there was only 1.
In the dirt strange and interesting things lie to be found.
The prodigy had once spent an afternoon lifting the rocks in the rock garden and peering underneath. There were elegant long centipedes and delicate flesh-coloured worms that gave her a tingle to see them. Under one rock the prodigy found something cold, white, and sticky-looking, rolled up in a ball. She poked it and it moved a very little, but stayed still afterwards. It looked as pale as the root of celery but sickly, as if it were bad milk. She was afraid to touch it and felt ill.
Now the prodigy shudders at the memory of the white lump in the yard. Her grandfather, she learned from her mother, died of a lump in his throat that wouldn't stop swelling. It was a lump like the one under the rock, the prodigy knows now, and he must have swallowed it but why would he do such a thing.< br> 7 x 6, Mrs. Arena says without much hope.
The prodigy closes her eyes and through a dark glass she sees the gleam of a high boot. She quickly opens her eyes.
Did you know I write poems, the prodigy says.