Edugyan’s unpredictable year culminates in Giller win

A novel that, less than a year ago, was without a Canadian publisher has won the country’s most prestigious literary prize. Esi Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues, about a jazz musician who disappears in Nazi-occupied France, was awarded the $50,000 Scotiabank Giller Prize Tuesday evening, capping an unlikely run that has seen the Calgary-born novelist rise from obscurity to become one of the season’s most buzzed about authors.

Edugyan’s sophomore novel was supposed to appear in the spring with the now bankrupt Key Porter Books. Half-Blood Blues eventually landed with Thomas Allen Publishers, which released the book this summer, months after it had appeared in the U.K. (with the venerable literary press Serpent’s Tail) and the U.S. (Picador).

Accepting the prize at a Toronto gala, Edugyan thanked Thomas Allen publisher Patrick Crean for rescuing the book from limbo. “Thomas Allen has been the most amazing publisher,” she said. “After Key Porter – that wonderful Canadian house – fell apart, he (Patrick) came in and believed in the book and purchased it, and I’m so, so thankful for that. It’s been a wonderful experience, Patrick.”

Edugyan also thanked her editors Jane Warren and John Williams (of Key Porter and Serpent’s Tail, respectively), as well as a trusted early reader, the author Jacqueline Baker. Finally, she acknowledged her husband, poet and novelist Steven Price, “without whom nothing gets written.”

In fact, Price, whose first novel, Into That Darkness, appeared this spring with Thomas Allen, had a hand in getting the book published, too. Crean said Price contacted him in April, “shortly after the problems with Key Porter,” and convinced him to take an advance reading copy to the London Book Fair. After reading the novel on the plane, Crean said he was “absolutely beguiled and amazed.” He signed the book not long after returning to Toronto.

This is the second time Thomas Allen has won the Giller, and only the third time in the prize’s 18-year history that a solely Canadian-owned firm has published the winning title. When Thomas Allen last won the Giller, in 2002, it was for Barbadian-born novelist Austin Clarke’s The Polished Hoe.

Crean described being in the winner’s circle for a second time as “an absolute thrill.” He added: “It’s also a thrill to see a young African-Canadian woman win it. I think we have a lot of wonderful writers of many different backgrounds, but we seem to have a dearth of young writers of that particular heritage.”

Edugyan is a second-generation Canadian whose father emigrated from Ghana in the 1970s.

There are currently 23,000 copies of Half-Blood Blues in print. “Tomorrow morning we’re going to be pushing the button again,” Crean said. “I don’t quite know what the number is going to be, but it’s going to be upwards of 20,000.” Thomas Allen has sold just 250 e-book copies of the novel, but Crean said “that may change very rapidly now.”

Following the controversy that erupted last year when winning publisher Gaspereau Press was unable to keep up with demand for Johanna Skibsrud’s The Sentimentalists, Crean reassured retailers that history isn’t about to repeat itself. “[Gaspereau is] an artisan publisher, and one has to respect that very much,” he said. “We’re a more commercial house, and we keep our eye on the sales figures and make sure there’s enough inventory.”

The Giller is just one among a full slate of literary prizes Edugyan was eligible for this fall. With Giller co-nominee Patrick deWitt she shares the peculiar distinction of having been nominated for all three of Canada’s major literary awards as well as the U.K.’s Man Booker Prize.

Last week, deWitt won the $25,000 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize for his sophomore novel, The Sisters Brothers (House of Anansi Press). Along with Edugyan and deWitt, a third Giller nominee is eligible for the $25,000 Governor General’s Literary Award, which will be handed out next week: David Bezmozgis, nominated for his first novel, The Free World (HarperCollins Canada).

The other Giller nominees were Lynn Coady’s The Antagonist (Anansi), Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table (McClelland & Stewart), and Zsuzsi Gartner’s Better Living Through Plastic Explosives (Hamish Hamilton Canada).

Anansi, which has yet to win a Giller, has now been nominated 10 times, more than any other publisher save Random House of Canada and McClelland & Stewart.

Anosh Irani novel longlisted for Man Asian prize

Montreal resident Miguel Syjuco shot to literary prominence in 2009, when his then-unpublished manuscript, Ilustrado, won the Man Asian Literary Prize. This year’s longlist has been announced, and another Canadian resident – Anosh Irani – has a chance to nab the $30,000 (U.S.) award. Irani was nominated for his novel Dahanu Road, which was published here by Doubleday Canada.

He has some stiff competition, in particular from Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe, who was nominated for his novel The Changeling.

From Free Malaysia Today:

Authors from China and the Philippines also made the list selected from a total of 54 titles from 14 different Asian countries submitted to the judges, led by Brick Lane author Monica Ali.

“The judges have encountered the best of new fiction from across the region, from India to China, from the Philippines to Japan, and the long list reflects this diversity,” Ali said in a statement.

“As a reader I have been entertained, moved, and also informed – new worlds have opened up.”

Irani will have to wait until February to find out whether he’s made the shortlist. The winner is announced in March. Read the Q&Q review of Dahanu Road here.

Books of the Year 2010: Fiction and Poetry

There’s no formula for choosing the books of the year. Some break ground, some tackle familiar themes with new energy. Some represent the best work from established authors, some introduce us to important new voices. And some are simply in-house favourites we feel deserve a little more attention. Here are the Fiction and Poetry books that made the most impact in 2010.
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New literary festival launches pan-Caribbean prize

Authors of Caribbean descent, and fans of world literature, take note: there is a new literary festival taking place next year in Trinidad and Tobago that will celebrate writing from the region. The centrepiece of the four-day event, which runs April 28 to May 1, is a literary prize that will be open to an international slate of authors.

The $10,000 (U.S.) OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature will be awarded to the best work of fiction, poetry, or non-fiction published in English by an author who is either a Caribbean citizen or was born in a Caribbean country. From the Bocas Lit Fest website:

The Caribbean’s rich literary heritage — in multiple languages — has made a contribution to world culture well out of proportion to the region’s small size. We have produced winners of many literary awards, including three Nobel laureates — Saint-John Perse (1960), Derek Walcott (1992), and V.S. Naipaul (2001). But until now there has been no indigenous Caribbean literary award, organised and judged by Caribbean people, of genuinely international scope.

The fiction category will be judged by author, editor, and former publisher Margaret Busby as well as by a pair of authors who call Canada home: David Chariandy (Soucouyant) and Lorna Goodison (From Harvey River). The winner in each of three categories – fiction, poetry, and literary non-fiction – will then vie for the $10,000 pot.

Daily book biz round-up: book thrown at Obama; Kindle Singles; and more

Today’s book news:

• Paperback thrown at Obama
• Adam Gopnik wonders what literary prizes are for
• Amazon launches Kindle Singles (not to be confused with Kraft Singles)
• Salman Rushdie to write memoir about years in hiding
• Orange Prize organizers drop award for new writers
• Emma Donoghue’s Room bookshelf

“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?

Bookmarks: historical vampires, Nabokov’s last work, and forgotten Pulitzers

Sundry links from around the Web:

• The New York Times looks at established authors who write well into old age.
• The co-author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies announces his next book: Abraham Lincoln, vampire hunter.
• The Wall Street Journal shines a light on the battle against the Comic Sans Serif font. Oddly, while the article provides excellent examples of the detractors’ ire, it doesn’t really establish why they hate the font so much. (Besides, we all know that if it weren’t for Comic, Ransom would take over.)
• Coming soon from Random House: the e-book equivalent of DVD special features.
• Vladimir Nabokov’s final book to be published in November.
• Proving the seven-figure book deal isn’t dead – in Asia, at least – a debut novelist receives a sizable advance from Penguin India.
• The top-ten forgotten Pulitzer-prize winners.

Another day, another literary award controversy

The winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, which is partially funded by the Booker foundation, has been announced. The majority of titles on the shortlist – Hunger, The Unfaithful Translator, The American Granddaughter, Time of White Horses, The Scents of Marie-Claire – read like standard lit-prize material.

Then there’s the winner, Egyptian author Youssef Ziedan’s Beelzebub, a work of historical fiction that “features a 5th century Egyptian monk in Alexandria and delves into the history of divisions among fathers of the church over the nature of Christ,” according to The L.A. Times. The title refers to the Devil, who “unlike in classical religious thought . . . is not cursed as the voice of evil but implicitly hailed as the voice of human reason, which pushes the protagonist throughout the novel to question the universe around him.” As The L.A. Times puts it:

[Ziedan's] critique goes beyond the role of religious institutions to the essence of monotheistic religions: “The substance is the same; it is based on the superiority of oneself over others under the pretext of possessing a god who owns the truth. This element of superiority is the same in all three religions, which gives rise to violence. As long as religions last, violence will persist.”

[...] The work sympathizes with sects that challenged the divine nature of Christ, and it quickly ignited fury within the Coptic Church, which has about 10 million followers in Egypt.

In the manner of all good journalism, this Quillblogger will refrain from commentary; however, he looks forward to the inevitable English translation and Da Vinci Code-like storm of protest.

John Updike dies

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and man of letters John Updike has died of lung cancer, at the age of 76. From the Associated Press:

A literary writer who frequently appeared on best seller lists, the tall, hawk-nosed Updike wrote novels, short stories, poems, criticism, the memoir Self-Consciousness and even a famous essay about baseball great Ted Williams.

An old-fashioned believer in hard work, he published more than 50 books in a career that started in the 1950s. Updike won virtually every literary prize, including two Pulitzers, for Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest, and two National Book Awards.

Update: the New York Times obit.

Montreal resident picks up Man Asian prize

The winner of the second annual Man Asian Literary Prize has a Canadian connection – the 31-year-old Filipino author lives in Montreal, where he works as a copy-editor at The Gazette.

Miguel Syjuco, who received an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University, picked up the $10,000 (U.S.) prize yesterday in Hong Kong for his debut novel Ilustrado, which tells the story of fictional man-of-letters Crispin Salvador. The novel was written in English but has yet to find a North American publisher. (The Man Asian is awarded to books that are unpublished in English.)

The judges’ panel was presided over by the Right Honourable Adrienne Clarkson, who praised the book for its stylistically daring premise:

Ilustrado seems to us to possess formal ambition, linguistic inventiveness and sociopolitical insight in the most satisfying measure. Brilliantly conceived, and stylishly executed, it covers a large and tumultuous historical period with seemingly effortless skill. It is also ceaselessly entertaining, frequently raunchy, and effervescent with humour.