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^ Former city author honored for her book Canadian author Isabel Huggan, a former Intelligencer editor, has been honored with the Quality Paperback Book club's annual New Voice Award for her book 'The Elizabeth Stories". The book was published this year by Viking Penguin books and details the adolescence of a girl in small-town Canada. The book club describes Huggan, 44, as "the most distinctive and promising author of a work of fiction in the last year" Huggan and her husband Bob, a former journalism teaching master at Loyalist College, now live in Kenya with their 10-year old daughter. She previously won a major Canadian literary award for "The Elizabeth Stories" and also had a children's story produced for television by Global TV. In 1972 Huggan came to The Intelligencer as social editor. She says the experience was invaluable. "To write features and do the news taught me a lot about looking and listening. Having to meet a deadline and turning out copy day after day after day was really good discipline," says Huggan. Huggan is now in Nairobi with her husband Bob, who is an Ottawa communication-manager on a three-year project in Africa. In January, the Canadian External Affairs Department flew Huggan to New York to accept her award, which included a $5,000 U.S. cheque. Huggan's book is set in a small town called Garen, presumably in the Kitchener-Waterloo area. In the book, she features a number of short stories about a teenage girl growing up in a small town. She says the award was a surprise. "It's like a second blooming. No one imagines their first book winning anything," she says.