Opening Creative Space in Canada

The shortlist for Canada's Scotiabank Giller Prize has been announced, and the finalists are :

Joseph Boyden - Through Black Spruce (novel)
Anthony De Sa - Barnacle Love (short stories)
Marina Endicott - Good to a Fault (novel)
Rawi Hage for his novel - Cockroach (novel)
Mary Swan - The Boys in the Trees (novel)

(Read more about all the authors on the website.)

Margaret Atwood who is one of the judges spoke about the power of the Giller to :

... put people into the spotlight who might never have been there. It's astonishing how much talent there is out there. You open up a cultural space like that and I guess I've always said — and have been saying recently — Canada is full of creativity. You make a space for that, for that creativity to be and to flourish, and there it is.

Most of those shortlisted have just one or two novels under their belts.

The winner will be announced on November 11th.

Meanwhile, Across the Atlantic ...

Right, now we've got the Booker excitement out of the way, it's time to shimmy across the Atlantic to see what's happening with a couple of other very important literary awards. (And as always thanks Eric for jogging my memory).

The shortlists for the National Book Awards in the US were announced. The fiction list interests me most, so here it is.

Mischa Berlinski - Fieldwork (A thriller set in northern Thailand with anthropologists and missionaries competing with each other for influence over the hill tribes.)

Lydia Davis - Varieties of Disturbance (A collection of "spare and always surprising" short fiction. )

Joshua Ferris - Then We Came to the End (A comedy set in the world of advertising.)

Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke ("An epic novel of bungled espionage and small mercies in the Vietnam era.")

Jim Shepard - Like You’d Understand ("Eleven first-person stories that offer an eclectic overview of the human experience.")

You can see all the shortlists of books in all categories on the NBA website, and then click through to read more about the selected titles and authors.

The finalists will be announced on 14th November.

The other award is Canada's Scotiabank Giller prize, which provides us with another tasty list of novels:

Elizabeth Hay - Late Nights on Air (The lady is compared to Annie Proulx and Isabel Allende - that's enough for me!)

Michael Ondaatje - Divisadero (I'm still wondering how one of my favourite authors could have missed the Booker boat completely, so I'm glad to see it here. I have this one lined up to read.)

Daniel Poliquin - A Secret Between Us ("An epic tale of a wartorn society in the midst of astonishing transformation.")

M.G. Vassanji - The Assassin’s Song (Vassanji has won the Giller Prize twice before, and I have a copy of his earlier The In-Between World of Vikram Lall - acquired at a times warehouse sale! - waiting to be read.* This novel is described as a "memorable, melancholy family saga.")

Alissa York - Effigy ("A stunning novel of loss, memory, despair and deliverance by one of Canada’s best young fiction writers, set on a Mormon ranch in nineteenth-century Utah.")

More information about the prize and the individual titles here. The winner will be announced November 6th.

*One of the judges for the Giller is our friend, Camilla Gibb, who recommended Vassanji's novel to me when I asked her advice about the best Canadian fiction to read.

Emergency Doctor Wins Giller

Jordan was kind enough to send me this link to a CBC interview with this year's Giller prize winner.

Canada's major literary award this year went to Toronto doctor and writer, Vincent Lam for his collection of short fiction Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures which follows the lives of four medical students. Lam beat four other authors in a field of relative unknowns.

Lam whose family migrated from Vietnam has apparently been mentored by Margaret Atwood, who helped him to find a publisher. And he is at work on his first novel, which is due out next year. His print debut, incidentally, was with a co-authored medical book: The Flu Pandemic and You.

Lam has a very demanding job as an emergency physician, yet finds no conflict between the day job and writing:

I find that I can be exhausted as a writer after having worked a fair bit and still have the energy to go to the hospital. In fact, I’m relieved by the concreteness of medicine. And I can be mentally exhausted as a doctor and I’ve still got writer energy. They’re very different processes. Writing is something that starts from the page and off you go, whereas with medicine, you’re confronted with a situation and then have to deal with it.

And I liked his answer in the interview about whether his patients ever recognise him from the fiction:

Very occasionally. Thankfully, a couple of things work against that happening. One is that I do emergency medicine, so people come to me when they have emergencies, so they are primarily concerned with their health problems. Two, I’m a man of average build and figure. I haven’t got movie-star looks, so I can blend into the crowd. But I must say that one of the things that sets me apart from other doctors is that if a patient has a book with them, I’m always curious about what they’re reading.

Postscript

Lotus Reads has a couple of interesting posts about the shortlist and Lam's win.