Dear Evelyn takes top fiction prize
TORONTO British-Canadian author Kathy Page choked back tears as she thanked her parents for the love letters that inspired her book, Dear Evelyn, which won the $50,000 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize on Wednesday night.
The wartime romance tracks the 70-year union between the working-class Harry Miles and the strongwilled Evelyn Hill as their relationship is tested by global conflict, the challenges of child rearing and the pursuit of individual meaning in a shared life.
Page, who lives in Salt Spring Island, B.C., said it took her eight years to write Dear Evelyn, partly because of her struggle to wrestle with its unusually personal subject matter.
Page said that in a sense, she felt she was sharing the honour with her parents.
“So much of our shared life was behind the writing of it,” she said. “And the whole of my life, which they obviously deeply influenced, propelled me ultimately to this book.”
Page, twice nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize for her works of short fiction, beat out four other contenders, including awards darlings Esi Edugyan and Rawi Hage, for the $50,000 prize.
Page was among seven authors being honoured at the 2018 Writers’ Trust Awards, which gave out more than $260,000 in prizes Wednesday night.
Ottawa-based author Elizabeth Hay won the $60,000 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Non-fiction for All Things Consoled: A Daughter’s Memoir, which details her experience acting as a guardian and caregiver to her parents.
Hay said in an interview that she intended the memoir as a tribute to her late parents, and while she thinks they would be thrilled about her win, she wouldn’t want them to read the book.
“It’s a book I couldn’t have written when they were alive, because there were things in it that would have hurt them,” said Hay. “(Parents) are our first characters. My parents were a formidable pair . ... I studied them, I endured them, I loved them for 60 years, so that means I spent 60 years with these characters. For a writer, that’s a gift.”
Hay, who won the 2002 Writers’ Trust Engel/Findley Award and the Giller in 2007, was among five finalists who made the short list for the $60,000 prize, billed as the richest annual literary award for a book of nonfiction by a Canadian writer.