Governor General's Literary Award - Fiction

On Tuesday, Linda Spalding won the 2012 Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction with her historical novel The Purchase. I have not yet had a chance to read this book, but it sounds intriguing:

"Pennsylvania 1798. Daniel Dickinson, a young Quaker father and widower, leaves his home to establish a new life with his 5 children and a 15-year-old orphan wife. In an act of misplaced compassion, Daniel buys a young slave boy, Onesimus, setting off a chain of events that sweep over several generations."

Spalding was also nominated for the Rogers Writers' Trust Prize for Fiction, won by Siege 13 by Tamas Dobozy; Dobozy, in turn, was shortlisted for the GG Award. However, neither book was nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, won by Will Ferguson for 419. This marks a broad year for Canadian fiction, with three very different books winning the big three awards. In 2011, the awards lists were dominated by two novels, Half-Blood Blues and The Sisters Brothers.

Read more about Linda Spalding at Maclean's, Quill & Quire, and CBC.

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.

Review: Siege 13 by Tamas Dobozy

This collection of linked short stories is remarkable. Dobozy writes about the 1944 siege of Budapest and its effect on its citizens, the culture and the subsequent generations. His writing is sharp, and each story carries the memories of the siege that his characters cannot let go. Excellent!!

Four Non-Fiction Awards

With the influx of shortlists this fall, I usually focus on the fiction awards since that is what I tend to read. However, there are several non-fiction awards that are worth mentioning.

I don’t have anything against non-fiction, and I like really good non-fiction, but I prefer fiction in most cases. Simply, I have an infinite list of books to read, and I will choose fiction over non-fiction 99% of the time. However, every once in a while a non-fiction title will catch my eye and I will pick it up (usually reading it alongside a novel I am into at the time). I usually read books about music, literature or sports - Jonathan Lethem’s Fear of Music, The Library at Night by Manguel and Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running are a few examples. I am intrigued by biographies of writers. I like reading about music, and fans of music. Nick Hornby and Lethem are great examples of this. I also like books about baseball - Moneyball was great, so was The Boys of Summer.

But these are just my tastes. Apparently, non-fiction has experienced a redefinition in the last decade, moving from factual reporting to creative non-fiction. Not “creative” like James Frey, but creative as in imaginative prose. Writers are adding narrative to works of non-fiction in a way that hasn’t really been done before. The stories will continue to be interesting, but writers themselves are generating a following, regardless of what they write about - Michael Lewis is one such writer, or Malcolm Gladwell, or Bill Bryson.

The increase in non-fiction writing awards reflects this shift. The Governor General’s Literary Awards have always celebrated non-fiction, but new awards, such as The Charles Taylor Prize for Non-Fiction, or the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, have brought more attention and prestige to non-fiction writers.

If you are a fiction reader and want to expand your reading list, the prize shortlists are good places to start. Not only will the subjects be captivating, the writing will be at a high level. There’s no reason to hang on to the stereotype of dry non-fiction writing.

The Hilary Weston Prize announced its shortlist on September 25th. Like the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the prize celebrates Canadian non-fiction over the last year. The GGs were announced last week, and the Charles Taylor Prize is handed out in the Spring.

Another non-fiction award shortlist was announced this past week. The Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction was created in 1997 and is one of Britain’s richest literary awards. It is open to books published in the UK, but not necessarily by UK authors, which allows writers in English from other countries to be considered for the prize. This year’s shortlist features Into The Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest by Wade Davis, a Canadian author. This book is also nominated for the GG award, and was a finalist for the Charles Taylor Prize in 2012. By all accounts, this trifecta is remarkable. Davis’s book details George Mallory’s attempt at Mount Everest following the Great War. Perhaps this shall be added to my to be read list this year - it is certainly getting enough acclaim to warrant a glance.

One more short list - the GGs

Yesterday, the finalists for the Governor General's Literary Awards were announced. There are seven categories in both languages, so the entire list is quite long. I am only going to focus on the fiction short list, which is, to me, the most interesting. The GG Award is the third in the Canadian trifecta of literary awards, along with the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Rogers Writers' Trust Prize for Fiction. Last year, both Esi Edugyan and Patrick deWitt were nominated for all three, with Edugyan winning the $50,000 Giller and deWitt winning the Writers' Trust and GG, at $25,000 each.

This year, there will be no possibility of a triple crown winner. No book has been nominated for all three awards, though several are in line to win two of the three. Here is the GG Fiction list:

Siege 13 by Tamas Dobozy

Dr. Brinkley's Tower by Robert Hough

The Headmaster's Wager by Vincent Lam

The Juliet Stories by Carrie Snyder

The Purchase by Linda Spalding

The biggest name on this list is Vincent Lam, who has already won the Giller for his 2006 collection of short stories, Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures. However, Dobozy and Spalding are also nominated for the Writers' Trust Prize, making them the front-runners, in my mind. Then again, none of these five titles are nominated for the Giller Prize, which indicates an incredible dearth of Canadian fiction in 2012.

Also intriguing is the absence of several big names - Linden MacIntyre, Alice Munro, M.G. Vassanji and Annabel Lyon, all previous winners of major awards, have been omitted.

Another notable finalist is Sheila Fischman for translating Kim Thuy's Ru from French to English. Ru won the GG Award for French fiction in 2010, and the English version is nominated for this year's Giller Prize.

The Governor General's Literary Awards will be announced on November 13th.

And now the GGs

Nino Ricci wins the GG award for fiction for his novel The Origin of Species: "The young searching protagonist of Nino Ricci's The Origin of Species takes us into the now distant world of the post-Trudeau 1980s," the jury said in its citation. "Set mostly in Montreal, with an illuminating voyage to the Galapagos at its centre, this exquisite novel is both tough and tender and, in the end, confirms our belief in the resilience of the human heart" (from CBC books). Well, it sounds like a winner.

GGs Announced!

The finalists for the Governor General’s Literary Awards (more affectionately known as the GGs) were announced yesterday with the winners being announced November 18th. Some familiar faces are on the list, including Rawi Hage for Cockroach which is also a finalist for the Giller. I won't list everything here since there are numerous categories, but anyone interested can take a peak on the Canada Council website at http://www.canadacouncil.ca/prizes/ggla/.