Non-Fiction Award Wind-up

Over the last 3 days, three major non-fiction awards have been handed out: the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction, and the Governor General's Literary Awards. The winners are:

Samuel Johnson Prize Winner

Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize Winner

Governor General's Literary Award Winner

The Guardian writes that Davis's book "puts the three attempts to climb Everest, between 1921 and 1924, into the context of the first world war: most of the 23 climbers had seen action, including Mallory, and Davis explores how the yearning to conquer the mountain was partly a response to the atrocities of the previous decade."

Savage's book "is a personal narrative that addresses the violent history of the Cypress Hills region of eastern Saskatchewan, where Savage lives part of the year. The jury’s citation describes A Geography of Blood as 'a haunting meditation on time and place' and 'a part memoir, part history, part geological survey, part lament, part condemnation of the accepted myth of the settlement of the Western Plains,'" according to Quill & Quire.

King, also from Saskatchewan, awed the GG prize jury: "Leonardo and the Last Supper is a combination of brilliant storytelling and superlative writing. Ross King portrays the towering genius of Leonardo in a way that will engage experts and delight a general audience. Impeccable research delivered with a novelist’s panache."

Read more about the respective awards at The Guardian, Quill & Quire, and CBC News.

The Man Booker Prize Shortlist Announced

photo from cbc.ca

The second shortlist to be announced within a week is for the 2012 Man Booker Prize. The list is as follows:

Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists
Deborah Levy, Swimming Home
Hilary Mantel, Bring up the Bodies
Alison Moore, The Lighthouse
Will Self, Umbrella
Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis

No Canadians on this list, unfortunately. As with the longlist announcement, Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies is the prohibitive favourite. Last year’s winner, Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending, came with a bit of controversy, as the “jury was accused of dumbing down after the chair of the panel said finalists had been chosen for ‘readability’’’ (CBC Books). This year’s list is “more adventurous” with a debut novel from Thayil, a stream of consciousness novel from Self, and two novels, from Levy and Eng, that were previously rejected from British publishers.

It is an interesting list and I will do my best to get through it before the October 16th announcement. However, having not yet read Wolf Hall (gasp), I won’t be able to read Bring Up the Bodies - it is a proper sequel.

Below is a list of other sites reporting on the announcement:

The Man Booker Prize
CBC Books
The Guardian
Page Views
The Millions
The Mookse and the Gripes