Vincent Lam on Governor General’s short list
Former Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Vincent Lam, CBC reporter Nahlah Ayed and writer Noah Richler are among the authors shortlisted for the $25,000 Governor General’s Literary Awards.
Lam, who won the Giller in 2006 for his short story collection Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, is shortlisted for the English-language fiction prize for his novel The Headmaster’s Wager.
Other nominees in that category are Kitchener’s Tamas Dobozy for Siege 13; Toronto’s Robert Hough for Dr. Brinkley’s Tower; Waterloo’s Carrie Snyder for The Juliet Stories; and Toronto’s Linda Spalding for The Purchase.
Ayed and Richler are nominated in the non-fiction category; Ayed for A Thousand Farewells: A Reporter’s Journey from Refugee Camp to the Arab Spring and Richler forWhat We Talk About When We Talk About War, respectively. Also shortlisted are Toronto’s Carol BishopGwyn for The Pursuit of Perfection: A Life of Celia Franca; Vancouver’s Wade Davis for Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest; and Ross King, originally from North Portal, Sask., now living in the U.K., for Leonardo and the Last Supper.
Spalding summed up the accomplishment in one breath: “I feel pretty happy.”
The Toronto author, 69, said she has always written but was never published until she was 40.
The Purchase revolves around Daniel Dickinson, a young Quaker father and widower, who leaves his home in Pennsylvania in 1798 to establish a new life.
She says it’s wonderful being nominated, but she refuses to get in a knot over it. “I like the book . . . I’m happy with what I’ve done,” she says.
Snyder said her nomination “really is a dream come true” since she has been taking pen to pad since she was a child.
“I remember being 7 and reading in the Guinness Book of World Records that the youngest published author was 4,” she said with a laugh. “I was annoyed.”
Her work, The Juliet Stories, depicts the life of 10-year-old Juliet Friesen, whose family moves to Nicaragua. It’s 1984, the height of Nicaragua’s post-revolutionary war, and the peace-activist Friesens have come to protest American involvement.
She said she has never been nominated for a major prize before and calls the news a significant event in her life.
“But I’ve always written and I always will,” she says.
The Governor General’s Literary Awards honour the best Englishlanguage and French-language books in the categories of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama, children’s literature (text), children’s literature (illustration) and translation.
The Canada Council for the Arts funds, administers and promotes the awards, with each winner receiving $25,000.
Non-winning finalists each receive $1,000, bringing the total value of the awards to about $450,000.
The final announcement is to be made at the Conservatoire de musique et d’art dramatique du Quebec in Montreal with other honours at Rideau Hall in Ottawa on Thursday, Nov. 28. For a full list of nominees go to www.canadacouncil.ca/prizes/ggla