According to a report by The Globe and Mail’s London-based columnist Leah McLaren, the independent British publishing house Faber & Faber is planning to launch a writing school in Toronto this fall. Set to open in October, the Faber Academy Toronto will employ at least one high-profile Canadian author: Miriam Toews, who is published by Faber in the U.K. and whom Academy head Patrick Keogh says will be “involved in an essential way” in the school.

From the Globe:

The Faber Academy, a successful offshoot of Faber’s core publishing business, was launched 18 months ago in Paris, with a course taught at the legendary English language bookstore Shakespeare and Company, by novelist Jeanette Winterson.

Since then, the school has expanded to included short and long courses in London, Dublin and Geneva, with an expansion to Edinburgh and Glasgow planned for later this year. Instructors have included Tracy Chevalier, Anne Enright, Paul Auster, Kazuo Ishiguro and Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney.

McLaren speculates whether Toronto has a deep enough talent pool to match London’s, though from the sounds of things, the school’s administrators are aiming high:

After taking a series of meetings with writers including Margaret Atwood, Anne Michaels, Michael Redhill, Madeleine Thien, Michael Helm, Andrew Pyper and Ken Babstock, Keogh says he is so confident the Toronto school will be a success, Faber is already looking into plans to expand the model to Montreal and Vancouver.

Margaret Atwood has been given the Crystal Award by the government and business muckety-mucks attending this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

From the Winnipeg Free Press:

“I am very honoured to have been given the Crystal Award this year,” Atwood said.

“The future of the planet will depend on a great deal of human creativity, and it is heartening to see an organization focused on economies recognizing the contributions made by artistic creators and thinkers.

“After all, language, music, and visual art are a part of the human heritage that is much older than economies as we know them today. They are who we are, while money is a neutral tool that enables us to do what we imagine.”

The Crystal Award honours personalities who are highly regarded as both cultural leaders and global citizens committed to improving the state of the world. The award (a Swiss mountain crystal) pays tribute to the decisive role that culture and arts play in the creation of global understanding and peace.

Former recipients include actress Emma Thompson, cellist Yo-Yo Ma and dancer Mallika Sarabhai.

Given Atwood’s emphasis on the importance of language and creativity, perhaps she can convince the good people at the WEF to come up with a less generic-sounding name for the prize….

In Margaret Atwood’s recent dystopian novel, The Year of the Flood, there is a litany of the saints worshiped by the eco-cult known as God’s Gardeners. One of these is Saint Bridget Stutchbury of the Shade Coffee. Readers familiar with Stutchbury’s 2007 book Silence of the Songbirds, about the various ways in which modern societies are imperiling the lives of avian species around the world (in part by buying sun-grown coffee, as opposed to the more bird-friendly shade-grown alternative) might get a titter out of this reference, but it is far from an anomaly for Atwood, who is a noted bird-lover.

Over the weekend, Atwood published a long piece in the Guardian about her longtime affection for all things avian – an article that references everything from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” to Hitchcock’s 1963 film The Birds. The article provides ample evidence of Atwood’s erudition, but is also a personal reckoning with her own relationship to birds:

I’ve always lived in the birdy world. I grew up in it – my parents were early conservationists and naturalists – and I can tell you from personal experience that small children have a limited tolerance for sitting still in canoes for hours on end being gnawed by mosquitoes, to see if the Very Rare Blur will deign to do a flit-by, when they won’t see it anyway because they were making the more controllable ant crawl up their arms. But early training does sometimes bear fruit, and I reconnected with the bird world once everyone, including me, realised that I was nearsighted. I needed special help with the twirly thing on the top of the binoculars, at which point the Very Rare Blur resolved into something I could actually see.

After examining the way writers and poets have historically used birds in their work, Atwood veers into Stutchbury territory, ending with an impassioned cri de coeur about the tenuous existence of many bird species in our world:

For instance, in the south Chile seas, the accidental capture of seabirds has been reduced from 1,500 a year to zero, with a close to zero rate having been achieved in Argentina. Despite these gains, 100,000 albatrosses are still being killed in fisheries every year, and 18 albatross species are facing extinction. But there’s a glimmer of hope: the task force [established by BirdLife in 2005] has shown that with a lot of will and with ridiculously small amounts of money, the death trend can be turned around. But it’s a matter of time, and extinction is forever. Human beings, it seems, are like little children, who never do quite believe that “all gone” means there isn’t any more, at all, ever.

UPDATE: An unedited version of this post containing the incorrect title of Atwood’s latest novel was accidentally posted. Quillblog regrets the error.

A few bookish links from across the Web:

• To help you with the holiday shopping season, The Inkwell Bookstore Blog compiles a selection of gifts for the Jane Austenite on your list, including the Pride and Prejudice board game 
• Margaret Atwood picks the top ten gifts to give a budding novelist
• The New Yorker has compiled the top ten books of 1709. The most colourful title? Cotton Mather’s The Golden Curb for the Mouth, a sermon against swearing
•  The Brontë sisters get a little help from the Twilight phenomenon: The Guardian reports that new films of Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Charlotte’s Jane Eyre are being cast with younger, hotter stars to appeal to Twihards 
• You’ve heard of the proposed Harry Potter theme park. How about a theme park dedicated to Gulliver’s Travels? 
• Bask in “the soft periwinkle glow of the Alaskan morning,” because the results of Slate’s “Write like Sarah Palin” contest are in
• The blogosphere has been buzzing with the best books of the decade lately, so what about the decade’s worst books? 

Bookish links from around the Web:

• Happy (belated) birthday, Margaret Atwood. The author turned 70 yesterday
• Colum McCann has won the fiction prize at the National Book Awards for his novel Let the Great World Spin. Also at last night’s gala in New York, Dave Eggers picked up the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community
• Expanding on James Wood’s assertion that “prizes are the new reviews,” Salon.com’s Laura Miller discusses the emerging trend of “vanity book awards”
• Is the Apple tablet dead?
• The Literary Review has released the shortlist for the annual Bad Sex in Fiction award. On this year’s list are Philip Roth – no surprise there – Nick Cave, Paul Theroux, and Jonathan Littell
• Lou Reed, Maureen “Moe” Tucker, and Doug Yule, three members of the Velvet Underground, are reuniting for the first time in more than a decade, at – where else? – a branch of the New York Public Library, to promote a new coffee-table book, The Velvet Underground: New York Art

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?

It’s not quite the biggest reward that can be given to a writer (that would be inclusion in Oprah’s Book Club, or maybe Richard and Judy’s), but the Nobel Prize for Literature is nothing to sneeze at – just look what it has done for last year’s winner, J.M.G. Le Clézio (who?). The prize is to be handed out tomorrow, and the international book media abounds with speculation. That the head of the prize  recently remarked that the Nobel has been too “Eurocentric” in its picks has caused some to believe this is America’s year, with maybe Philip Roth or Joyce Carol Oates heading to Stockholm.

As far as the oddsmakers are concerned, however, the prize is most likely to go to Israeli writer Amos Oz. According to the odds posted at Ladbrokes.com, Oz has a 3-1 chance of walking away with it, the same German author Herta Müller (who?).

Alice Munro is farther down the list at 25-1, the same odds as Bob Dylan(?). Atwood is 40-1, and Ondaatje is 50-1.

Whoever wins, the odds of someone posting, within 24 hours of the announcement, a video mashup on YouTube featuring Kanye West interrupting the ceremony in Stockholm are about 2-1.

The Scotiabank Giller Prize shortlist was announced this morning, and it included a mix of “sure bets” and surprise nods. The biggest surprise, however, was the omission of Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood (McClelland & Stewart), which was widely considered the frontrunner going into the announcement. The five shortlisted titles are:

• Kim Echlin, The Disappeared (Penguin Canada)
• Annabel Lyon, The Golden Mean (Random House Canada)
• Linden MacIntyre, The Bishop’s Man (Random House Canada)
• Colin McAdam, Fall (Penguin Canada)
• Anne Michaels, The Winter Vault (McClelland & Stewart)

The shortlist, selected by Canadian author Alistair MacLeod, U.S. author Russell Banks, and U.K. author Victoria “Muskoka Chair” Glendinning, included no independent publishing houses. It also included the only two male authors to make the 12-title longlist, Linden MacIntyre and Colin McAdam. Titles left off the list include the aforementioned The Year of the Flood, Martha Baillie’s The Incident Report (Pedlar Press), Claire Holden Rothman’s The Heart Specialist (Cormorant Books), Shani Mootoo’s Valmiki’s Daughter (House of Anansi Press), Kate Pullinger’s The Mistress of Nothing (McArthur & Company), Jeanette Lynes’ The Factory Voice (Coteau Books), and Paulette Jiles’ The Colour of Lightning (HarperCollins Canada).

The winner of the 2009 Scotiabank Giller Prize will be announced on Nov. 10.

Sundry links from around the Web:

• Margaret  Atwood, who recently reviewed the novel of a close friend, reflects on weighing truth against friendship
• Introducing the vook, Simon & Schuster’s cleverly named hybrid of an e-book and video
• Stephen King is coming to Toronto
• The debate in Australia over parallel importation rages on. Now, publishers and booksellers are rejecting the “zero day” compromise, which would force publishers to release books at the same time as international editions
• Elmore Leonard receives another lifetime achievement award, this time from PEN U.S.A.
• Disgruntled booksellers in Hay-on-Wye stage an uprising

Sundry links from around the Web:

• In honour of Leonard Cohen’s 75th birthday yesterday, 1 Heck of a Guy comes up with an incomplete list of Cohen’s many nicknames. Quillblog favourites: #22: Master of the Egg Salad Sandwich and #60: Poet of Swinging Suicides
• A 700-plus page “utopian fantasy” starring superheroes Bill Cosby and Yoko Ono? Yes, it’s Ralph Nader’s “quirky fiction debut” 
• Can’t get enough of Dan Brown mania? Here are 10 titles to tide you over after The Last Symbol tsunami 
• Philip Seymour Hoffman as The Giving Tree? EW’s Shelf Life  picks classic children’s books they’d like to see given the Hollywood treatment 
• Margaret Atwood tells The New York Times why she scares herself 
• Despite previous concerns, the Philadelphia Free Library System is NOT shutting down