Governor General Literary Award Winners 2005
Gilmour wins GG for fiction
by Mary Soderstrom
Nov. 16, 2005: The Governor General’s Literary Award for English fiction has gone to David Gilmour, a Torontonian who is very well known in media circles, but the two coasts, the centre of the country, and a new Canadian were also big winners in the 2005 awards, announced Wednesday morning at Montreal’s Grande Bibliothèque.
A television and print literary critic, Gilmour won for his sixth novel, A Perfect Night to Go to China. During his acceptance speech, Gilmour joked that he’d made enough enemies over the years that the list of people who would be unhappy he won the award was much longer than the list of people who would be happy about it.
But winners from other regions were much more positive about what the GGs meant to them and to the places they write from and about. Anne Compton, the PEI native who won the poetry award for Processional, said her win was another recognition of the “remarkable literary production of the region’s novelists, poets, and storytellers,” which has been flourishing since the 1990s.
Pamela Porter, the winner for children’s literature – text, said her book The Crazy Man, which takes place in Saskatchewan, was conceived as a celebration of the people, the problems, and the “big blue sky” of the heart of Canada.
John Vaillant, who won the non-fiction prize for The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness and Greed, drew gasps from the crowd when he pointed out that his book was the first story about British Columbia to win a GG since Emily Carr won for Klee Wyck in 1941. Other books about B.C. have been shortlisted but, as for wins, “It’s been quite a dry spell,” he said. “British Columbia seems to be an awfully long way from Ottawa and Montreal, but it is very good to be on the wide side of the Rockies.”
The winner of the French fiction prize came from even further away, however. Aki Shimazaki, a native of Japan who learned English before she learned French, won for Hotaru, the fifth book in a series set partly in Japan. Shimazaki and Alberta native Nancy Huston are the only two non-native French-speakers to win the top French fiction prize in the history of the GGs. “I started to learn French when I started writing my books,” Shimazaki said in accented French as she thanked her publisher, her readers, and her friends who had helped her perfect her French.
The awards announcements were made in Montreal this year as part of UNESCO’s Montreal World Book Capital celebration. The GG winners will return to the Grande Bibliothèque tonight to read from their works at an event organized by the Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival and the Canada Council. Next week, Governor General Michaëlle Jean will honour them at two events at Rideau Hall, a morning reception for the children’s literature winners (to which schoolchildren are invited) and a gala evening dinner.
Here is the full list of English winners:
• Fiction: David Gilmour’s A Perfect Night to Go to China (Thomas Allen Publishers)
• Non-fiction: John Vaillant’s The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness and Greed (Knopf Canada)
• Poetry: Anne Compton’s Processional (Fitzhenry & Whiteside)
• Drama: John Mighton’s Half Life (Playwrights Canada Press)
• Children’s Literature – Text: Pamela Porter’s The Crazy Man (Groundwood Books)
• Children’s Literature – Illustration: Rob Gonsalves’s Imagine a Day (Atheneum Books for Young Readers/Simon & Schuster Canada), text by Sarah L. Thomson
• Translation – French to English: Fred A. Reed for Truth or Death: The Quest for Immortality in the Western Narrative Tradition (Talonbooks), a translation of Raconter et mourir: aux sources narratives de l’imaginaire occidental by Thierry Hentsch (Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal)