Not by design, but by coincidence, an unprecedented ten of the twelve long listed
novels for the 2009 Giller Prize are written by women. The annual award, formally
known as the Scotiabank Giller Prize, is Canada's single most lucrative literary
award. To be eligible for this $50,000 award, a book must be a first-edition
full-length novel or short story collection written by a Canadian citizen or
permanent resident of Canada. For this year's judges, the Giller looked outward
from its central Canadian roots and brought in Maritime Canadian author Alistair
MacLeod, American novelist Russell Banks, and UK writer Victoria Glendinning. They
each read 96 Canadian novels and narrowed the field down to twelve contenders, ten
of them written by women authors.
With more than forty books in her ouevre, author and poet Margaret Atwood is an
icon of CanLit, and one of the most honored authors of fiction in recent history,
including having won the Giller Prize in 1996 for Alias Grace and won Booker
Prize in 2000 for The Blind Assassin. Her works have been adapted for movies,
television, and opera. Her Giller-nominated 2009 novel, The Year of the Flood,
revisits the dystopian future she created in Oryx and Crake, this time focusing
on members of God's Gardeners—religion devoted to the melding of science,
religion, and nature.
Martha Baillie drew on her experiences working at the public library to write
her fourth novel, The Incident Report. This intriguing novel is told in 144
brief reports by a librarian working with the "mad and marginalized" who
frequent the Toronto Public Library. Baillie was born in Toronto, educated at
the University of Edinburgh, the Sorbonne, and the University of Toronto.
She still works for part-time for the Toronto Public library which she has done
so for nearly twenty years. She lives in Toronto with her husband and daughter.
A best seller in Montreal since its release in early spring, The Heart
Specialist tells the story of early 20th century doctor Dr. Agnes White (based
on real life Dr. Maude Abbott), who "was never considered ladylike. She is drawn
to the wrong things, such as anatomy and dissection." Clair Holden Rothman has
worked as a lawyer, a teacher, a newspaper columnist and a translator in her
native Montreal. The author of two short fiction collections, The Heart
Specialist is Rothman's first novel.
US-born Canadian Paulette Jiles wrote The Color of Lightning using oral
histories from post-Civil war Texas. The novel winds together the stories of a
freed slave and his family as they move west and settle in Texas, and Samuel
Hammond, a Quaker who is newly appointed to the Office of Indian Affairs.
Jiles, who is also an award-winning poet and a memoirist, is the author of
three novels, including the 2003 prize-winning, Enemy Women.
Fast-paced and light-hearted, The Factory Voice is a mystery about four women
working at an Ontario military aircraft factory in 1941. Through her novel and
her character of Muriel MacGregor, Jeannette Lynes introduces readers to the
real person of Elsie McGill, a.k.a. Queen of the Hurricane, Canada's first
female aeronautic engineer. This is a first novel for Jeanette Lynes, who is
the author of five collections of poetry, and is currently a visiting scholar
at the University of Manitoba.
Shani Mootoo was born in Ireland, grew up in Trinidad, and then moved to
Canada in the 1980s. An accomplished visual artist, she is the author of five
books, including Cereus Blooms at Midnight, a previous finalist for the Giller
Prize. Her latest novel, Valmiki's Daughter, tells a story of miscommunication
about race, gender, class and sexuality between a Trinidadian daughter and her
father.
It took fourteen years for Kate Pullinger to write her novel, The Mistress of
Nothing. Not yet released in North America, this historical novel follows a
lady's maid as she accompanies her employer—the real life eminent Victorian
Lady Lucie Duff Gordon—on a trip to Egypt. Pullinger has previously written
nine books, including the novelization of The Piano that she co-wrote with
director Jane Campion. She grew up in small towns in British Columbia, attended McGill
University and worked in a copper mine in the Yukon Territory before moving
to London, England, where she teaches writing.
In early October, the judges narrowed the long list of twelve contenders down
to a short list of five which includes the books of three of the female authors.
The first of these, Annabel Lyon's The Golden Mean, is a first person account of
Aristotle's relationship with his student, the future Alexander the Great.
Although this University of British Columbia creative writing instructor has
published short story collections, this is the first novel from this thirty-eight
year old from New Westminster, British Columbia. This novel has scored a
literary hat trick by garnering three major award nominations: in addition to the Giller,
The Golden Mean is also in the running for both Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction
Prize and, along with Kate Pullinger's The Mistress of Nothing, the Governor
General's Award.
Besides writing, Kim Echlin teaches at the University of Toronto, writes
documentaries, and produces television for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC).
Her third novel, The Disappeared, is the story of Anne Greve, who falls in
love with a Cambodian student she meets at a local Montreal jazz club. He
returns to his war-torn country to find his family, and after Anne fails to
move on with her life, she decides to follow him, and the "two self-exiled
lovers struggle to recreate themselves in a world that rejects their hopes."
The third female finalist on the shortlist is Toronto writer and award-winning poet Anne Michaels,
who is known for her bestselling, multi-award winning novel Fugitive Pieces,
which was made into a major motion picture in 2007. Her second novel, which
comes over a decade after her first, is The Winter Vault. As with her earlier
novel, The Winter Vault mixes poetic language with the author's love for botany
and science to tell a tender love story and meditation on loss and rebuilding
set against the mid-twentieth century Canada and Egypt.
Critics are certain that Too Much Happiness would have been a serious contender
for the prize, but the author Alice Munro withdrew it from the running because
she has already won the award twice (in 1998 for The Love of a Good Woman and
in 2004 for Runaway). Munro, who was recently awarded the Man Booker
International Prize for her body of work, pulled her latest book from the
competition in order to open opportunities for younger authors. The two male
authors also short listed are Colin McAdam for Fall and Linden MacIntyre for
The Bishop's Man. The Giller award winner will be announced November 10, 2009.