Petitions, rejections, controversy
After 80 years and in a growing world of awards, are the GGs still needed?
By the time the judges finally got around to deciding on the 1936 prizes, one of the winners had died. The other, Bertram Brooker, had sold only eight copies of his novel, Think of The Earth. And John Buchan — the Governor General who established the now-annual literary prizes — endowed Canadian Poetry Magazine with the money to provide a gold medal for its awards night, but left GG winners with a lowly bronze.
These days, 14 winners (seven each in English and French) get $25,000 — in an increasingly crowded field of literary prizes: the Giller, the Griffin the Writers Trust Awards and a host more. In 2016, 80 years later, should we still care about the Governor General’s Literary Awards?
Over time, their impact has diminished, admits Nick Mount, an English professor at the University of Toronto and author of the upcoming book Arrival: The Story of CanLit, “but we need them.”
Back in the 1930s, Mount notes, we had approximately one writer per 3,000 people; now it’s 1 in 600.
“When you have more books, you need more prizes, just to help people sort through it. How else are you going to notice these things?”
And the GGs, he says, stand out for their lack of a corporate name or sponsor.
Given their air of independence, we may look to them for “books that matter to Canadians, as corny as it sounds.”
Indeed, the list of GG winners offers a unique picture of Canadian literature — and not just because it covers a number of genres.
“The history of the awards is the history of modern Canada itself,” argues Andrew Irvine, who has written a bibliography of the GGs and owns first editions of all the winning works.
For example, the 1930s winners and nominees, he says, focused on nation-building and the 1940s books on the Second World War.
The 1960s works were experimental — “There were two ‘books’ of poetry (by bp Nichol) that were really boxes of sheets of paper and you could get different poems by shuffling” — and more recent winners tend to be international in scope, reflecting “an outward-looking idea about finding Canada’s place in the world.”
The scope of the awards was broadened in 1959 when French-language literature was added to the mix — although not every writer welcomed a pat on the back from Ottawa.
From 1969 to 1977, four Québecois authors declined the awards (which have been administered, since 1957, by the Canada Council) for political reasons.
However, after the1980 Quebec referendum, two of these authors — poet Fernand Ouellette and playwright Michel Garneau — accepted GGs for subsequent works.
In 1987, the GGs added prizes for works in translation (from French to English and vice versa), seeking to bring the two traditional solitudes a little closer together.
That said, the awards would be too blandly “Canadian” without its controversies. Over the years, various authors have denounced the prizes, even when they’ve won.
Leonard Cohen famously declined the 1968 poetry award for his book-Selected Poems, 1956-68, declaring “there’s nobody in Canada who can judge my work.”
B.C.’s George Bowering won (and accepted) a GG for poetry in the following year; he recalls feeling encouraged that a revolution in Canadian poetry and publishing was un- der way — although it didn’t quite pan out. In 1980, he became the first writer to win for fiction, too, and he was pleasantly surprised — he had figured he would be seen as a poet playing at being a novelist.
If he were to win again now, he says, “Maybe I would be disappointed. Everybody who’s a writer agrees that, at least in poetry, the GG’s Award has a habit of missing the book that is clearly going to be great in years to come . . . and you begin thinking, ‘Who voted for this and how did they get to be on that committee? Oh, right, you’ve got to have somebody from Nova Scotia, somebody from Saskatchewan . . . ’ ”
The Canada Council assembles the juries who decide the awards from writers’ peers, and it looks to vary jurors’ regions and perspectives. The process may be arbitrary, but it’s at least well-meaning.
And, to its credit, the Canada Council welcomes controversy.
In fact, the controversies “enriched the discourse about Canadian literature. If people feel very strongly that another book should have won, fantastic,” says Tara Lapointe, the council’s director of outreach and business development.
“That just gives us more diversity of books to read.” The 2016 Governor General Literary Awards will be announced Tuesday. The finalists will be reading at the International Festival of Authors on Monday.
“When you have more books, you need more prizes, just to help people sort through it. How else are you going to notice these things?” NICK MOUNT U OF T ENGLISH PROFESSOR