Looking outward

What are the odds that Canadian writers would earn two of the six spots on the short-list for the prestigious Man Booker Prize for Fiction?

Not great, considering they were competing with the best English-language authors in the world.

But kudos to Vancouver-born Madeleine Thien and Montrealnative David Szalay, who pulled it off.

Thien is short-listed for Do Not Say We Have Nothing, a story that starts in Vancouver and explores the politics of China during the Cultural Revolution and the legacy of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. (Her book was also long-listed for Canada’s illustrious Scotiabank Giller prize last week.)

Szalay (who was raised in Britain and now lives in Hungary) is nominated for All That Man Is, a collection of stories that follow men at different stages in their lives in various European cities.

Canadian writers are hardly strangers to the Booker, the most celebrated award internationally for English-language writers. But it’s a sign of the steadily growing prestige of Canadian writing that they’ve been recognized more and more frequently in recent years.

It took 23 years from the founding of the Booker in 1969 for the first Canadian, Michael Ondaatje, to win in 1992 for The English Patient. Just eight years later, Margaret Atwood scored for The Blind Assassin, then it was Yann Martel’s turn in 2002 for Life of Pi and Eleanor Catton’s in 2013 for The Luminaries.

The competition has been even tougher since 2013, when it was opened to English-language writers anywhere in the world, allowing U.S. authors to vie for the prize.

The fact that Canadians can earn two spots this year alongside two Britons (Deborah Levy and Graeme Macrae Burnet) and a pair of Americans (Paul Beatty and Ottessa Moshfegh) is particularly satisfying.

Their work also underscores that Canadian writing these days more often than not looks outward and explores universal themes.

Of course, it’s possible to find the universal in quintessentially Canadian experience (as Alice Munro, our beloved Nobel Prize winner, famously did). But nowadays Canadian writers can just as frequently be found ranging around the world — at least in their imaginations.

Inevitably, this has altered our understanding of exactly what constitutes “Canadian” writing. Instead of worrying about that, however, we should embrace the change. If it works for the Booker judges — and it clearly does — then it works for us.

Two Canadian writers have been short-listed for the prestigious $87,000 Man Booker Prize