This is the season of prizes. The Nobel goes to French writer Patrick Mondiano (whom I've never read, and must now), the biggest Canadian prize for non-fiction, the $60,000 CDN Hillary Weston Writers' Trust Prize, goes to Naomi Klein for This Changes Everything: Capitalism Vs. the Climate, the Booker goes to an Australian guy who was stone cold broke when he finished the book, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, and our local fiction prize named after novelist Hugh MacLennan will go to one of three names who are not big ones, yet.
The Quebec Writers' Federation short list includes: Jon Paul Fiorentino for I’m Not Scared of You or Anything from Anvil Press, Sean Michaels for Us Conductors from Random House Canada and Guillaume Morissette for New Tab from Véhicule Press/Esplanade Books.
Interestingly, neither Heather O'Neill's The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, finalist for the Scotia Bank Giller Prize nor Claire Holden Rothman's My October, finalist for the Governor General's Prize for Fiction, made the cut.
This appears to be the result of completely different juries having different ideas about what is good, and in the case of the QWF jury, perhaps a penchant for young writers. The three finalists are well under 40.
That's probably all to the good, but I guess I'm going to have to read all the books to decide which jury has the line on quality.
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