Longshot pays off for Governor General’s award winner

When St. John’s, N.L.- native Joel Thomas Hynes found out he had won this year’s Governor General’s Literary Award for Englishlanguage fiction, he had a hard time believing the good news.

“I thought it was a mistake at first,” Hynes said on the phone interview from Atlanta, admitting he was still trying to get used to the news.

We’ll All Be Burnt in Our Beds Some Night (HarperCollins), a darkly comic novel about a petty criminal trying to turn his life around, was praised by judges as “an act of full-throttle imagination and narrative invention.”

The Governor General’s Awards, founded in 1936, are among Canada’s oldest literary honours. English and French awards are handed out in seven categories with the winners receiving $25,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, which administers the prizes.

Winning the prestigious award felt like a “longshot aspiration for a fringe writer like myself,” Hynes said. Finding a publisher was a long and demoralizing process, he said, even though he had already authored several books.

“Seeking publication is the act of seeking approval for what you’ve done,” he said.

“Not receiving the kind of connection that you would hope for in the industry, you think: ‘I’m way off the mark in terms of what’s palatable for readers.’ ”

“I was very tempted at times to just put it in the bottom drawer. But there was something about this one that I just really wanted to stick with, and I really felt like I couldn’t move on in my life until I had it out of my system.”

Hiro Kanagawa of Port Moody won the drama award for Indian Arm (Playwrights Canada Press), a modern adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s Little Eyolf about Indigenous and non-Indigenous characters struggling with their relationships to land and ownership.

Calgary’s Richard Harrison won the poetry award for his collection On Not Losing My Father’s Ashes in the Flood (Buckrider Books), set against the backdrop of the Alberta flood of 2013.

In the young people’s literature category, the text award went to Cherie Dimaline’s speculative fiction novel The Marrow Thieves (Dancing Cat Books). The winner for illustrated book was David Alexander Robertson and Julie Flett’s When We Were Alone (HighWater Press), about the history of residential schools. The winner in the French-to-English translation category was Oana Avasilichioaei for Readopolis (BookThug), her translation of Bertrand Laverdure’s Lectodome (Le Quartanier).