Toronto novelist wins GG prize
Sarah Henstra wins out over some heavy hitters
Writers representing communities across Canada have been named winners of the $25,000 Governor General’s Literary Awards, including Toronto’s Sarah Henstra for her novel The Red
Word and Sooke, B.C.’s Darrel J. McLeod for his memoir, Mamaskatch: A Cree Coming of Age.
The Governor General’s Awards are always a sentimental favourite among authors.
This year’s winners will be presented with their prizes and a specially bound volume of their work by Governor General Julie Payette at Rideau Hall in Otta- wa on Nov. 28.
Independent presses dominated the winners’ list this year, with all the major English-language adult prizes going to books from smaller publishers.
Each prize has a separate jury panel to choose it; the panel for the English-language fiction prize said of The Red Word (ECW Press), “Groundbreaking and provocative, this is an astonishing evisceration of the clichés of sexual politics as they exist not only on our college campuses, but also within broader present-day society. Alternately heartbreaking, funny and critical, no one gets off easily.”
It won out over a field of five finalists that included heavy hitters Miriam Toews’ Women Talking and Rawi Hage’s Beirut Hellfire Society.
About the English-language nonfiction winner Mamaskatch, A Cree Coming of Age (Douglas & McIntyre), the panel said the book “dares to immerse readers in provocative contemporary issues including gender fluidity, familial violence and transcultural hybridity. A fast-moving, intimate memoir of dreams and nightmares — lyrical and gritty, raw and vulnerable, told without pity, but with phoenixlike strength.”
This year’s poetry winner was Wayside Sang by Cecily Nicholson of Burnaby, B.C. (Talonbooks). The prize for drama went to Botticelli in the Fire & Sunday in Sodom (Playwrights Canada Press) by Jordan Tannahill. The winner of the Young People’s Literature — Text category was Sweep: The Story of a Girl and her Monster by Jonathan Auxier Swissvale (Puffin Canada/Penguin Random House Canada Young Readers), while the prize for Young People’s Literature — Illustrated Books was won by They Say Blue by Toronto’s Jillian Tamaki (Groundwood Books).
Phyllis Aronoff and Howard Scott won for Translation from English to French of Descent Into Night ( Mawenzi House).