“This is the big leagues, ladies and gentlemen,” announced writer Lewis DeSoto, host of the Governor General’s Literary Award Finalists night at the International Festival of Authors on Oct. 25. “One of these authors will be entering the pantheon of gods and goddesses.” He named former winners of Canada’s venerable prize (which dates back to 1937), like Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen and Emily Carr, to underscore his point.
It’s officially prize season in book land, and two of the larger national awards — the Governor General’s and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize — held readings for their finalists at the IFOA in advance of their galas in mid-November where they will give away sizable sums of cash. The exact size of the sum is of inescapable interest — will the winners be able to buy a house? A fancy car? Pay off a credit card? The size of the award, in fact, often dictates how seriously it’s taken. (With the notable exception of the spunky ReLit Award, which champions “ideas, not money,” and presents winners with a cool decoder ring rather than a big-ass cheque.) The bottom line is that the GG's and the Writers’ Trust, both of which offer a $25,000 purse, should help buy the winning authors some time to work on their next project, which is as admirable and practical a service as any award system can hope to provide.
And yet, prize time also brings out the less charitable side of the arts community, since in Canada, a major award can mean “the difference between selling seven copies and selling several thousand,” as book-designer Bill Douglas pointed out at the Judging a Book by Its Cover panel last weekend, something that can utterly change the course of a career. People grumble about safe lists, crony lists and the more curious what-the-fuck lists. As difficult as it is to win the awards themselves, it’s damn near impossible to win the popular vote.
Even Desoto, when introducing Rawi Hage, jocularly pointed out that since Hage has already won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize, the “largest and most international of its kind” at £100,000, for his debut story collection DeNiro’s Game (Anansi), he was “probably the richest writer in the room, and the most hated by other writers… or at least the most envied.” Indeed Hage’s new novel, Cockroach, about a man forced to revisit his childhood after a failed suicide attempt, is nominated for both the GG's and the Writers’ Trust Award, along with Rivka Galchen’s novel Atmospheric Disturbances, a novel about a 51-year-old psychiatrist who believes his wife has been replaced with a simulacrum.
At the Governor General’s night, the other English-language fictionfinalists — Nino Ricci, David Adams Richards and Fred Stenson —joined Hage and Galchen in reading from their nominated works. Previous GG's winner Ricci read from his new novel, The Origin of Species, about a hapless Concordia grad student obsessed with Darwin. Richards, a two-time GG winner — for both fiction and non-fiction — read from The Lost Highway, a novel about a man’s lifelong feud with his tyrannical great uncle. Last up was Stenson, who read from The Great Karoo, which follows Canadian soldiers — and their horses — to the Boer War at the turn of the last century. Last year’s GG's-winner for poetry, Don Domanski (All Our Wonder Unavenged) started the night out with a short interlude of lyrical verse. He was later spotted bumming smokes during the break and talking about Wallace Stevens.
The Rogers Writers’ Trust evening on Oct. 29, hosted by the affable Larry C. Murray, was a considerably brisker affair, where Hage read the same passage from Cockroach, while Galchen took the opportunity to read from an earlier section of Atmospheric Disturbances, rather than the final chapter as she had on Monday. Poet Patrick Lane read from his lyrical first novel Red Dog, Red Dog, which featured beautiful descriptive passages. Lee Henderson read from his buzzed-about book The Man Game, a sprawling time-crossing work about love and secret sports in Vancouver history. Miriam Toews gave a particularly funny and sexy reading from The Flying Troutmans, during which her protagonist searches for her lost teenage nephew with an amorous hippie she picks up on the street.
The winner of the Governor General’s Literary Prize will be announced on Nov. 18 and the winner of the Rogers Writers’ Trust Award will be announced on Nov. 17. Best of luck to all the noms — and may the neediest wallets win.