Fiction award short list starts with O’Neill and Smith
The Quebec Writers’ Federation has announced its short lists for the 2015 QWF Literary Awards and Heather O’Neill’s Daydreams of Angels leads the way.
The awards honour English-language writing in Quebec; if they are taken as a litmus test for the current state of the local literary scene, the diversity to be found among this year’s finalists bodes well.
O’Neill was a surprise QWF omission last year when her novel The Girl Who Was Saturday Night wasn’t shortlisted. She is arguably the favourite to win this year for her new story collection, already shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize (as was her novel from last year). Joining her in the running for the QWF’s Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction are Neil Smith for Boo, a novel that blurs the line between young adult and adult fiction (for QWF purposes it’s a novel, full stop) and H. Nigel Thomas for No Safeguards. Quebec City resident Thomas makes the fiction short list for the first time since 1994.
Every year’s set of short lists seems to contain at least one leftfield small-press underdog story; this year there are a couple, one of them in the Concordia University First Book category, where Joel Wapnick’s The View North From Liberal Cemetery, published by the tiny Wapiti Press, gets a nod. Wapnick is a professor emeritus at McGill and former World Scrabble Champion. His first novel is a love story set in a nursing home. His competition is provided by Anita Anand’s collection Swing In the House and Other Stories and Mike Steeves’ novel Giving Up. Steeves’ book was one of the best-reviewed Canadian debuts in recent years; many were surprised when it didn’t make the national short lists. The First Book prize is open to books from all categories.
Competing for the Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-Fiction are Judith Cowan’s The Permanent Nature of Everything: A Memoir; Carlos Fraenkel’s Teaching Piano in Palestine: Philosophy in a Divided World; and Kathleen Winter’s Boundless. An account of the author’s journey by boat through the High Arctic, Boundless was shortlisted for the RBC Taylor Prize for Non-Fiction.
In the running for the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry are David McGimpsey’s Asbestos Heights, Catherine Kidd’s Hyena Subpoena (another small press coup, this one for Wired on Words/Popolo Press), and Erin Moure’s Kapusta. McGimpsey is a past shortlistee; Moure has won the award twice. A surprise omission in this category is Robyn Sarah’s My Shoes Are Killing Me, announced last week as a Governor General’s Award finalist.
The Cole Foundation Prize for Translation alternates each year between English-to-French and French-to-English. This year it’s the latter, and the nominees are Phyllis Scott and Howard Scott for As Always (a translation of Madeleine Gagnon’s Depuis Toujours); Debbie Blythe for Turkey and The Armenian Ghost (from Laure Marchand and Guillaume Perrier’s La Turquie et le fantôme arménien); and past winner Sheila Fischman for Mãn (from Kim Thuy’s Mãn).
Some may note the absence of Samuel Archibald’s novel Arvida, a Giller shortlistee, from the fiction and first book categories. The discrepancy can be explained by the fact that the QWF’s fiction prize does not consider translations; the book was submitted in the Frenchto-English translation category but did not make the cut. Other surprises and divergences between and within the various prize-giving bodies can be put down to the human factor: juried awards are subjective by definition, and few experiences are more individual than the act of reading literature. The QWF’s short list limit of three, one or two less than that for most of the national awards, makes the competition all the more stiff.