| Regardless of who walks away with the Governor General’s Literary Awards on November 12, Canada’s small presses are big winners on this year’s shortlist.
After a disastrous half-decade during which the battles of big-box retailers inflicted heavy casualties, culminating in the bankruptcy of General Distribution Services this summer, the announcement of this year’s GG shortlist comes as a triumphant sign that, although the literary presses may be suffering financially, they are still vital creatively.
The GGs have all but ignored the small presses for the past few years, but this year they are represented in droves. For the first time, small-press books occupy two spaces each on the shortlists of both the crucial Fiction and Nonfiction categories. Of particular note in the Fiction category is Edmonton’s Gloria Sawai, who garnered her nomination for A Song for Nettie Johnson (Coteau Books), which also won two Alberta Book Awards last year. Stephen Henighan’s When Words Deny the World: The Reshaping of Canadian Writing (The Porcupine’s Quill), a controversial and potentially explosive exploration of Canadian literary culture after NAFTA, is up for the Nonfiction prize.
Henighan’s nomination can be seen as indicative of the jurors' mood this year; When Words Deny the World takes aim at a literary culture Henighan sees as compromised by corporatization and globabization. Similarly, multinational publishers were far overshadowed by indigenous Canadian presses on this year’s GG shortlist – 27 of the 34 nominated English-language books come from independent presses.
While the Drama, Poetry and Translation (French to English) categories are often comprised of small-press books (these being commercially marginal genres the profit-driven major houses tend to shy away from), a total sweep of all three categories is almost unheard of. Rarer still, in the two Children’s Literature categories, nine of the 10 nominated books are from Canadian independent publishers.
The awards are chosen by a jury of peers – writers, illustrators and translators who have no eligible book this year – and, as always, one of the delights of the GG shortlist announcement is reading the juries’ idiosyncrasies. It is likely that small publishers were better represented this year in part because the majority of jurors in all categories have had books published by small presses. This is not to suggest that jurors would be biased against the major houses, but rather that they would have greater awareness of small-press books than would authors who had only been published by multinational companies.
This year’s Poetry shortlist is particularly quirky. The highly cerebral list can be traced directly to the jurors all being poets with a strong commitment to postcolonialism and/or the avant-garde (the names of the jurors in all categories, as well as information on all nominated books, are available on the Canada Council’s Web site at www.canadacouncil.ca).
Two years ago, the cash value of the awards was increased from $10,000 to $15,000 each, and this year it's not just the winners that will receive money – for the first time, authors of all shortlisted books will receive $1,000. Publishers of winning books, as always, will receive $3,000 for promotion, a much-needed boost in a difficult time. And the added attention and sales that a nomination – let alone a win – will bring is a much-needed signal to the reading public that Canada’s independent presses are the life’s blood of an energetic literature. |
