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University of Regina Press is proud to announce that Will Aitken’s Antigone Undone: Juliette Binoche, Anne Carson, Ivo van Hove, and the Art of Resistance has been nominated for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction. The prize is given annually for excellence in the category of literary nonfiction, which includes essays, history, biography, memoir, commentary, and criticism. The winning book demonstrates a distinctive voice, as well as a persuasive and compelling command of tone, narrative, style, and technique.

"For author Will Aitken, the classics are very much alive. His Antigone Undone is about what happens to us when supposedly dusty works of art don’t just resonate but skewer us straight through. At first glance, this book is an examination of Antigone’s lasting relevance — and we do learn about the play’s meaning, its fraught history — but Aitken is really giving us a personal testament, not a lesson: a testament to the rough, mysterious power of art. By the end of his brief, brilliant book, Aitken himself is nearly undone — and Antigone emerges as a 2,500-year-old juggernaut more mysterious and magnetic than before."

— 2018 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction Jury (Michael Harris, Donna Bailey Nurse, and Joel Yanofsky)

More praise for Antigone Undone 

"Will Aitken does something remarkable in his new book: he brings together a keen critical eye and an open heart, and – in doing so – creates a unique hybrid of critical essay and memoir." - Montreal Review of Books

"Aitken champions a way of making and seeing the arts that heightens their relevance and brings Sophocles’s 2,500-year-old play into readers’ contemporary lives and world." - Publishers Weekly

"[A] beautiful book that examines the vast power art has over us, in both its creative and destructive capacities." - Carte Blanche

"This thoughtful and disturbing memoir poignantly illustrates how, for good or ill, the power of art can transform human understanding." - Quill & Quire