Youth and inexperience won the day in the English-language categories of the 22nd annual Trillium Book Awards luncheon, which took place earlier this afternoon in Toronto. The $20,000 English Book Award went to The Withdrawal Method (House of Anansi Press), the debut short-story collection by 31-year-old Pasha Malla, while the $10,000 English Poetry Award went to Crabwise to the Hounds (Coach House Books), the debut of 33-year-old Jeramy Dodds. (The Trilliums honour works by Ontario authors.)

Dodds, who lost the recent Griffin Poetry Prize to veteran A.F. Moritz, accepted his award by saying that he wished he’d brought a crash helmet in case he fainted at the podium, and that maybe he would use his prize money to buy one afterward. Beyond that, he simply thanked the staff of Coach House and his editor there, fellow Trillium nominee Kevin Connolly (who was shortlisted for his poetry collection Revolver), for encouraging him to press on with the collection even when it consisted of barely more than two poems.

Pasha Malla, meanwhile, accepted his award with his father at his side, and rather than talk about himself, he mostly talked about the new Pixar movie Up and the lessons it contains for budding authors. After his speech, Malla told Q&Q Omni that he is currently at work on his first novel, People Park, which is due out from Anansi sometime in 2010. He’s already completed about 150 pages, and he hopes to finish the rest when he does a residency later this year at Berton House in Dawson City, Yukon.

Malla beat out several more high-profile authors – Nino Ricci and Helen Humphreys – as well as Ibi Kaslik and Charles Wilkins. The jurors for both English-language awards were Q&Q’s own review editor Steven Beattie, publishing industry veteran Meg Taylor, and author Emily Schultz.

The French language awards, meanwhile, went to Marguerite Andersen for her novel Le figuier sur le toit (Éditions L’Interligne) and to Paul Prud’Homme for his children’s book Les Rebuts: Hockey 2 (Éditions du Vermillon).

English Book Award ($20,000):
Pasha Malla, The Withdrawal Method (House of Anansi Press)

English Poetry Award ($10,000):
Jeramy Dodds, Crabwise to the Hounds (Coach House Books)

French Book Award ($20,000):
Marguerite Andersen, Le figuier sur le toit (Éditions L’Interligne)

French Children’s Literature Award ($10,000):
Paul Prud’Homme, Les Rebuts: Hockey 2 (Éditions du Vermillon)

The 2009 Griffin Poetry Prize gala was held at the Stone Distillery in Toronto last night, and the literary community was out in full force, ready to eat fancy food, drink good wine, dance the night away, and, of course, honour the world’s best poets. For a full report of the event in Q&Q Omni, click here. (Photos courtesy of Julie Wilson, House of Anansi Press.)

Toronto’s A. F. Moritz took home the Canadian prize for his 2008 collection The Sentinel (House of Anansi Press).

Arkansas native C. D. Wright won the international prize for her collection Rising, Falling, Hovering (Copper Canyon Press).

Scott Griffin, founder and trustee of the prize, lets loose on the dance floor after the awards.

Among the many reactions to Alice Munro’s well-deserved winning of the Man Booker International Prize, one of the more interesting is that of The New Yorker, the magazine that has published the lion’s share of Munro’s stories over the decades.

On The Book Bench, the magazine’s book blog, Willing Davidson claims that “the arrival of a Munro story in the fiction department is always an event – her typescript pages, with their oddly bolded paragraphs, produce an almost atavistic salivary response.”

Really? They actually salivate when a new story arrives? Munro’s stories are great and all, but you know you’ve perhaps given over too much of your life to literature when you find yourself preparing to eat one.

Though, given how dry Munro’s prose style can be, perhaps a little spit is exactly what’s needed.

The third ever Man Booker International Prize was announced late yesterday, and it has gone to Canada’s own Alice Munro. She is the first Canadian to win the biennial £60,000 prize (the two previous winners being Ismail Kadaré in 2005 and Chinua Achebe in 2007), which is awarded based on an entire body of work.

From the Man Booker website:

Best known for her short stories, Munro is one of Canada’s most celebrated writers. On receiving the news of her win, she said, ‘I am totally amazed and delighted.’

The judging panel for the Man Booker International Prize 2009 is: Jane Smiley, writer; Amit Chaudhuri, writer, academic and musician; and writer, film script writer and essayist, Andrey Kurkov. The panel made the following comment on the winner:

‘Alice Munro is mostly known as a short story writer and yet she brings as much depth, wisdom and precision to every story as most novelists bring to a lifetime of novels. To read Alice Munro is to learn something every time that you never thought of before.’

Some reaction to the Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist, unveiled yesterday, is trickling in. The Canadian Press interviews two nominees, Jeramy Dodds and Kevin Connolly, while the National Post has a backgrounder on this year’s selections. Q&Q reviewer and conflict watchdog Zachariah Wells says this is “one of the best Canadian shortlists I’ve seen…. Kudos to Michael Redhill, this year’s Canadian judge.”

Wells does add, however, “Given that the prize is funded by Anansi’s owner, it would have looked a lot better if Redhill had managed to shortlist but one of their books.” And the Toronto Star’s Vit Wagner also notes the Griffin-Anansi link, though he doesn’t exactly press the point after Anansi president Sarah MacLachlan assures him that it’s a non-issue.

Quillblog’s take: it is an appearance of mild conflict, but probably unavoidable. Given Anansi’s commitment to poetry publishing, their titles deserve to be in the running, and if they’re in the running, they’re probably going to turn up on the odd shortlist. (It’s also worth noting that no Anansi title has won in the nine-year history of the prize.)

The 81st annual Academy Awards ceremony was held last night, and literary adaptations scored very well in high-ranking categories.

The big winner (and, in this Quillblogger’s opinion, the year’s most overrated movie) was Slumdog Millionaire, based on Vikas Swarup’s novel Q&A, which took home statues for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay, as well as winning for cinematography, editing, original song, score, and sound mixing.

Kate Winslet finally picked up an Oscar for her portrayal of an illiterate Nazi who has an affair with an underage teen in The Reader, Stephen Daldry’s adaptation of Bernhard Schlink’s Oprah-approved novel. And The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, won for art direction, make-up, and visual effects.

Revolutionary Road, the corrosive adaptation of Richard Yates’s even more corrosive novel, was shut out, although a case could be made that Winslet’s award was actually a twofer, since she also appeared in it, opposite her Titanic co-star, Leonardo DiCaprio.

Also shut out of yesterday’s ceremony (admittedly due to the fact that they weren’t nominated for anything) were adaptations of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight and Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth. Which may not bode well for early literary aspirants for next year’s Oscars, which to date include Confessions of a Shopaholic and He’s Just Not That Into You.

At this point, you gotta wonder: has anyone in Canada not read Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes? Released by HarperCollins Canada more than two years ago, the book has grown from a solid word-of-mouth sleeper to an out-and-out sales juggernaut, and it doesn’t look to be slowing down anytime soon. Not only was it recently chosen as one of the 2009 CBC Canada Reads selections, but Ontario Library patrons have just picked it as the winner of the Evergreen Award for most popular book of 2008. Oh, and Trent University has selected it for its 2009 Trent Reads initiative, which encourages every student to read and discuss the book.

Neil Gaiman (Sandman, Anansi Boys) has won the John Newbery medal, one of the most prestigious awards for children’s literature in the U.S.

Mr. Gaiman, 48, won for The Graveyard Book, a story about a boy who is raised in a cemetery by ghosts after his family is killed in the opening pages of the novel. In announcing the winner of what is widely considered the most prestigious honor in children’s literature, the Association for Library Service to Children, a division of the American Library Association, cited Mr. Gaiman’s work for its “delicious mix of murder, fantasy, humor and human longing,” noting its “magical, haunting prose.”

Gaiman says idea for The Graveyard Book was inspired, in part, by Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book — though the main characters in the novel are of the supernatural variety: vampires, witches, and werewolves (oh, my).

Apparently, Canada isn’t the only place where poets get their dander up about awards and perceived conflict of interest. The New York Times’ Paper Cuts blog points out a particularly vitriolic exchange in the Telegraph between Jascha Kessler, a poet who was passed over for the Yale Younger Poets award in 1956 (and apparently harbours a long-standing grudge.) Kessler was one of 12 finalists for the prize, which was adjudicated by W.H. Auden. The prize was eventually won by John Ashbery, who is, erm, slightly better known nowadays than Kessler.

According to the loser erstwhile finalist, Auden chose Ashbery – who was not among the dirty dozen, but whose work the elder poet specifically requested for consideration – due to a combination of what Paper Cuts calls “anti-Semitism” and “homophilia.” (Describing a bizarre dinner party he, Auden, and Ashbery attended in the 1950s, Kessler suggests that Auden made comments “about the Will-to-Live he thought innate in the Jew per se, that inner strength needed for survival, and such bosh,” and goes on to write, “What with Ashbery’s mewling, mincing manner and self-deprecatory modesty, his very speech manifested the goy gay persona par excellence.”)

No shrinking violet, Ashbery lashed back at Kessler the following week (December 3), calling the other author “seriously delusional,” and stating that Auden was uncomfortable with the prize’s vetting process, because he felt that many of the poets who were chosen as finalists were unworthy of recognition. Ashbery closes his letter with an example of the “self-deprecatory modesty” about which Kessler wrote:

As for John Ashbery, his manuscript had indeed been weeded out, along with that of another New York poet, Frank O’Hara. Auden contacted them both and asked that they re-submit their work directly to him. He received the manuscripts in little more than a week and made up his mind within days. The winner was Ashbery, salvaged from the slush pile to become in time one of the best-known poets the Yale series has ever published.

Being governor general isn’t all about making agonizing decisions regarding the state of Parliament and the political health of the country; once in a while you have to do ceremonial stuff, too. On Wednesday, Her Excellency the Right Honourable Michaëlle Jean handed over the Governor General’s Literary Awards at an Ottawa ceremony. (Photos by P. Doyle, courtesy of the Canada Council for the Arts.)

Nino Ricci gets the fiction prize for The Origin of Species (Doubleday Canada).

Odds are that Christie Blatchford, non-fiction winner for Fifteen Days (Doubleday Canada), either just said or is about to say something saucy.

Jacob Scheier, poetry winner for More to Keep Us Warm (ECW Press).

John Ibbitson won children’s text for The Landing (Kids Can Press)…

… and another Kids Can creator, Stéphane Jorisch, took children’s illustration for The Owl and the Pussycat.

Catherine Banks is either marvelling at her drama prize for Bone Cage (Playwrights Canada Press), or else she’s noticing something amiss.

Lazer Lederhendler picks up the French-to-English translation prize for his work on Nicolas Dickner’s Nikolski (Knopf Canada).