Ondaatje declines Governor General’s Literary Award consideration

Although there’s been much buzz over award newbies Esi Edugyan and Patrick deWitt’s impressive hat trick of nominations, another story unfolded today as Michael Ondaatje’s well-received The Cat’s Table was noticeably absent from this morning’s Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction shortlist.

According to his publisher, McClelland & Stewart, Ondaatje asked for The Cat’s Table, which is shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, to be withdrawn from consideration. The five-time GG winner released this statement through M&S: “This was done as I have received it many times and felt I should not enter a book again. The GG award has been very important to me and I greatly respect it and what it has done for our literature.”

Ondaatje isn’t the first CanLit veteran to bow out of an awards race. In 2009, Alice Munro withdrew from Giller consideration for her short story collection, Too Much Happiness, and both Munro and Margaret Atwood recused themselves the years they served on Giller juries. Two-time Giller nominee Timothy Findley asked that his 2001 novel, Spadework, not be considered “for any literary prizes.”

“High in antioxidants, low on caffeine”: Leah McLaren weighs in on CanLit

Globe and Mail columnist Leah McLaren is the latest public figure to opine on the state of Can Lit. Prompted by this year’s awards season, McLaren takes the discussion one step further (or, perhaps backward) by flat-out refusing to read any nominated titles.

Beyond wondering who does Annabel Lyon’s hair and if Margaret Atwood is “pissed” by her exclusion from several major shortlists, McLaren simply cannot deign to read jury-selected books, voracious reader though she claims to be. Which, of course, more than qualifies her to weigh in on the subject.

In Saturday’s column, she cautions against the dangers of reading what “the man” tells you to:

[...] despite all the good that literary prizes provide — and I say this as a member of the Authors’ Committee of the Writers’ Trust of Canada — there is also an inherent danger in their increasing cultural primacy.

As one Canadian writer who did not want his name used recently said to me in an e-mail, the problem with prize lists is that they take something intimate and eclectic and turn it into a socially sanctioned Cultural Event.

“Reading — unlike multiplex movie-going, say — is inherently idiosyncratic,” he wrote. “Its idiosyncrasy is in its strength, the breadth of library and bookstore choices offering a feast of discoveries for the curious and story-hungry. Prizes, on the other hand, ultimately work to shape a vast plurality of tastes into a single, institutionally endorsed selection. The Giller is a successful venture, no question about it. But successful at what? Bringing new readers to exciting, boundary-pushing, pleasure-filled books? Or calcifying CanLit into a predictable brand?”

She also likens prize lists to high-school English curricula and the content of prison libraries. Given this year’s sombre selections, it could be argued that McLaren has a point. Besides, who better to judge the state of CanLit than the author of the “giggly, airy” Continuity Girl?

Atwood snubbed by GG Awards jury, too

[This post has been updated. For Q&Q's complete coverage of the 2009 GG shortlists, see here.]

The shortlists for the Governor General’s Literary Awards were announced this morning at Ben McNally Books in Toronto, and Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood was snubbed again, after failing to make the shortlist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, too. We’ll have the full lists and some industry reactions later today, but for now, here are the nominees in the English Fiction and English Non-fiction categories:

FICTION:

• Michael Crummey, Galore (Doubleday Canada)
• Annabel Lyon, The Golden Mean (Random House Canada)
• Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness (McClelland & Stewart)
• Kate Pullinger, Mistress of Nothing (McArthur & Company)
• Deborah Willis, Vanishing and Other Stories (Penguin Canada)

NON-FICTION:

• Randall Hansen, Fire and Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany, 1942-1945 (Doubleday Canada)
• Trevor Herriot, Grass, Sky, Song: Promise and Peril in the World of Grassland Birds (HarperCollins Canada)
• Eric Margolis, American Raj: Liberation or Domination? (Key Porter Books)
• Eric Siblin, The Cello Suites: J.S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece (House of Anansi Press)
• M.G. Vassanji, A Place Within: Rediscovering India (Doubleday Canada)

POETRY:

• David W. McFadden, Be Calm, Honey (Mansfield Press)
• Philip Kevin Paul, Little Hunger (Nightwood Editions)
• Sina Queyras, Expressway (Coach House Books)
• Carmine Starnino, This Way Out (Gaspereau Press)
• David Zieroth, The Fly in Autumn (Harbour Publishing)

DRAMA:

• Beverley Cooper, Innocence Lost: A Play about Steven Truscott (Scirocco Drama)
• Kevin Loring, Where the Blood Mixes (Talonbooks)
• Joan MacLeod, Another Home Invasion (Talonbooks)
• Hannah Moscovitch, East of Berlin (Playwrights Canada Press)
• Michael Nathanson, Talk (Playwrights Canada Press)

CHILDREN’S LITERATURE (TEXT):

• Shelley Hrdlitschka, Sister Wife (Orca Book Publishers)
• Sharon Jennings, Home Free ((Second Story Press)
• Caroline Pignat, Greener Grass: The Famine Years (Red Deer Press)
• Robin Stevenson, A Thousand Shades of Blue (Orca Book Publishers)
• Tim Wynne-Jones, The Uninvited (Candlewick Press)
  

CHILDREN’S LITERATURE (ILLUSTRATION):

• Rachel Berman; text by Tim Beiser, Bradley McGogg, the Very Fine Frog (Tundra Books)
• Irene Luxbacher; text by Andrew Larsen, The Imaginary Garden (Kids Can Press)
• Jirina Marton; text by Janet Russell, Bella’s Tree (Groundwood Books)
• Luc Melanson; text by Olivier Ka, translation by Helen Mixter, My Great Big Mamma (Groundwood Books)
• Ningeokuluk Teevee; text by Ningeokuluk Teevee, translation by Nina Manning-Toonoo, Alego (Groundwood Books)

TRANSLATION (FRENCH TO ENGLISH):

• Phyllis Aronoff and Howard Scott, A Slight Case of Fatigue (Talonbooks); English translation of Un peu de fatigue by Stéphane Bourguignon
• Jo-Anne Elder, One (Goose Lane Editions); English translation of Seul on est by Serge Patrice Thibodeau
• David Homel and Fred A. Reed, Wildlives (Douglas & McIntyre); English translation of Champagne by Monique Proulx
• Susan Ouriou, Pieces of Me (Kids Can Press); English translation of La liberté? Connais pas… by Charlotte Gingras
• Fred A. Reed, Empire of Desire: The Abolition of Time (Talonbooks); English translation of Le temps aboli : l’Occident et ses grands récits by Thierry Hentsch

Kenneth Oppel in outer space

The 40th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing may be grabbing all the headlines today, so it’s easy to overlook a bookish footnote to the historic milestone. According to a press release from the Canada Council for the Arts, astronaut Robert Thirsk, currently aboard the International Space Station with fellow Canadian Julie Payette, has brought with him two books by Canadian authors – Airborn by Kenneth Oppel and Deux pas vers les étoiles by Jean-Rock Gaudreault. Both books share non-terrestrial themes (the former concerns dirigibles and the latter, a play, is about a wannabe astronaut) and they have both won a Governor General’s award. Thirsk brought along the books in recognition of the fact that he is a descendant of Sir John Buchan, Lord Tweedsmuir of Elsfield, the Governor General who established the Governor General’s Literary Awards in 1936.

Marchand on the Giller

The Toronto Star‘s regular book critic and culture columnist, Philip Marchand, has a column up about this year’s Scotiabank Giller Prize shortlist, announced this past week. He confesses to having felt some unease at the announcement of the longlist back in September, mostly due to its seeming emphasis on the inclusion of writers who, as the accompanying statement from the Giller jury put it, “populate every region.” Marchand detected a familiar cultural problem rearing its head:

The list had a faint whiff of political correctness, in short. It made me recall the press conference announcing the founding of the prize in 1994 and the late Mordecai Richler, one of the three initial judges, along with Alice Munro and University of Ottawa English professor David Staines, proclaiming, “All three of us are politically incorrect. Looking for the first winner, we will not favour young writers over old writers, or vice versa. We won’t favour a book written by a woman over a man, or a black, gay or native writer, any more than somebody whose family has been here for 200 years.”The criterion was to be strictly literary quality. What a concept! Richler’s comments at the time reflected widespread unease over the Governor General’s Awards for literature, a suspicion that juries for these awards were increasingly all too aware of the need for diversity in handing out prizes — the children’s birthday party syndrome. Make sure everybody gets a prize. Although Richler did not mention regions, the biggest bugaboo in this regard was certainly regional.

Marchand, though he still thinks releasing a longlist has as much to do with politics as marketing, feels much better about the shortlist. He especially approves of the small press-bent of the list, and of the inclusion of two titles in translation.

(Which goes to show, we guess, that the definition of “political correctness” can be a slippery one.)

Related links:
Read Philip Marchand’s column on the Giller shortlist

Win an award. Sell some books?

We all know that Gillers and Governor General’s Awards are boons for book sales in Canada. A book gets shortlisted, and its sales go up. A book wins, and its sales go up even further. But just how many sales are generated by awards is a somewhat murkier matter that depends on the book and award in question. Vit Wagner of the Toronto Star assembles the opinions of Canadian publishing execs and the sales data of notable cases to come up with a ranking system for awards according to sales power.

Wagner contends that the single-award media bash that is the Scotiabank Giller sells more books than the 14-piece, French- and English-language, non-televised Governor General’s Awards, and that the Man Booker, in most years, will trump them both. Questions still remain, however. Just how much of an effect do awards have on sales of books by internationally acclaimed authors like Alice Munro or already-hyped books like A Complicated Kindness? One thing is almost certain: in a year when both Scotiabank Giller and GG shortlists are void of Urquharts and Atwoods and full of names unknown to the general public, the winners of the prizes are almost sure to win big.

Related links:
Click here for the full story from the Toronto Star

May the coverage begin

It’s only two days after the Governor General’s Awards shortlists were announced, and media coverage has already been plentiful. The Toronto Star‘s Philip Marchand weighs in on the lack of overlap between this year’s GG and Scotiabank Giller shortlists, noting the frequency of the phenomenon — it also happened in 1997 and 1994 — and citing the release of a large number of books that were great but not too great as the cause of it this year, while shining a spotlight on only one of them — A Perfect Night to Go to China by David Gilmour, chosen ostensibly for its author’s status as the only veteran novelist on the list who was born and raised in Canada.

Over at The Globe and Mail, Michael Posner approaches the shortlists’ lack of intersecting books in a more realistic way, citing the subjectivity (but not the politics) involved in selecting a nation’s greatest books for any given year. Posner devotes web space to all English fiction finalists but Golda Fried and reports on lessons learned by novelist, GG English fiction juror, and Globe columnist Russell Smith. “You know what a grump I am about Canadian literature,” said Smith on Monday. “I thought this would be my opportunity to find out what was wrong with it.” Instead, Posner reports Smith saying that the problem was “how good so many of the books were.”

The CBC Arts website also has what reads like a puffed-up list of all books nominated. So far, no one has really owned up to the politics of shortlists. Will the realist in the audience please stand up?

Related links:
Click here for Marchand’s piece in The Toronto Star
Click here for Posner’s piece in The Globe and Mail
Click here for the piece on CBC.ca