The Arts Beat
By Andrea Martell
It’s Giller Prize time again, and Canada’s literati are excited about Canadian writers. That makes the Giller more valuable than its $25,000 prize.
The Giller Award was founded in 1994 by businessman Jack Rabinovitch in memory of his late wife, literary journalist Doris Giller.
The award is only in its fifth year and it’s already big enough that for the first time the ceremony was shown on TV Nov. 3. Publishers and booksellers seem to care about the ceremony’s clout, but the award’s value rests in its contribution to Canadian culture.
For nearly a month, books by four to six Canadian writers, some well-known, others not so well-known, find prominent placement in bookstore windows.
But it’s not the money that counts here, it’s that Canadians are reading Canadian novels, and thinking about Canadian writers, and without a Canada Book Day!
There are spin-offs to this — Unknown writers get higher profiles , they sell more books, and therefore have the means and the inclination to write more books. And their success encourages other Canadian writers to write and publish. Canadians read more Canadian novels and so on and so on.
For example, although it didn’t win in 1996, the Cure for Death by Lightning by Gail Anderson-Dargatz received a lot of attention and she is once again on the list this year with A Recipe for Bees.
Also, the Giller is giving the Governor General’s Award for fiction a run for its money. The Governor General’s Award is one of the most prestigious literary awards in the country and the combined results of the two separate awards vying for the attention of the media and readers are boosting the profile of many Canadian writers.
For example, last year everyone was talking about who would get the Giller: Mordecai Richler for Barney’s Version, Larry’s Party by Carol Shields, or Nino Ricci’s Where She Has Gone.
Critics were upset that Jane Urquhart didn’t get a nomination for her novel The Underpainter and speculated that the novel might not be nominated for the Governor General Award either.
The gossip and guessing over who would win brought the whole affair loads of newspaper space.
The Giller is great for Canadian culture, mostly because it reminds us that we have one, living and breathing through our storytellers.
Go Giller! Go Giller! Go Giller!