the devastating flood that happened in Morris in 1950 "is a related image that reverberates throughout the text". 1984 Night Travellers received the Gerald Lampert Award from League of Canadian Poets. Usually this its awarded for a first book of poetry. Ladies of the House Birdsell's second collection, from 1984, is a sequel collection to Night Travellers that the focuses on the Laftenierre family women from Agassiz and their women friends, though most of the stories ae set in Winnipeg. In 1987 it was republished with Night Travellers, in one volume called Agassiz Stories. An American edition, titled Agassiz: A Novel in Stories, appeared in 1991 (Minneapolis: Milkweed). Children's literature The Town That Floated Away (1997) was influenced by Birdsell's experience as a child of the 1950 flood in Morris, and narrates the adventures of young Virginia Potts after she is left behind when her town floats away. Birdsell also wrote A Prairie Boy’s Winter, a one act play for children, which was co-written and produced by Prairie Theatre Exchange, in 1986. Novels The Missing Child Birdsell's first novel, published in 1989, is "an evocative magic realist portrait of the fictional town of Agassiz", which won the W.H. Smith/Books in Canada First Novel Award. Chrome Suite Birdsell's second novel was published in 1992, and covers four decades of script-writer Amy Barber's life: from an extraordinarily hot summer in a small Manitoba town in 1950; "to the 1960s and the 1970s, when Amy marries, goes to live in the city, and begins to have reason to fear for her young son"; to the present, with Amy traveling from Toronto to Winnipeg with her young Polish, film-maker lover. The Russländer Published in 2001, this is Birdsell's third novel, and it explores Birdsell's own family history. The word Russländer means "Russians" in German and her mother and maternal grandparents were Mennonite emigrants from Russia. It was published as Katya in the US. It is the story of Katherine (Katya) Vogt, and her Mennonite family's life in Russia from the end of 1910, until she, her husband, two sisters, and grandparents emigrated to Canada in 1923. Katya was born in 1902. The story begins with the family living on the prosperous Mennonite estate of Abram Suddermann in the Ukraine, where Katya's father is the overseer. They are under the protection of the Tsar whose wife is German. This is part of the Chortitza Colony,