Dianne Warren holds up her book 'Cool Water' after winning the Governor General's award for fiction at a ceremony in Montreal on Tuesday.Graham Hughes/The Canadian Press
Two underdogs from Saskatchewan prevailed against better-known competitors to win the major English-language Governor General's Literary Awards in Montreal Tuesday, bringing a fitting end to an award season marked by surprises.
The fiction award went to first-time novelist Dianne Warren of Regina for Cool Water, which the jury described as an "exquisitely constructed novel" that "immerses readers in the difficulties and joys of everyday life" in the fictional town of Juliet, Saskatchewan. Warren is a veteran writer of short stories and plays.
Cool Water prevailed over Emma Donoghue's Room, the international bestseller that won the Rogers Writers' Trust Prize earlier this month and was short-listed for the 2010 Man Booker Prize in Britain. It also bested Annabel by Kathleen Winter, a first-time novel that was nominated for all three major Canadian prizes but ultimately failed to win any, repeating a melancholy feat first accomplished in 2008 by Cockroach, Rawi Hage's second novel.
Speaking from Montreal, Warren, 60, said she wrote her novel in the spirit of two Saskatchewan literary legends her illustrious predecessors, Sinclair Ross and W.O. Mitchell, but updated it for a contemporary audience. "This was my answer for what's happening now," she said.
"In part the book is about the mythologies about the West that I loved as much as anyone else when I was growing up," she added, "but it was really important to me that it be a contemporary book."
Finding a "contemporary, authentic voice in Western fiction" is not as easy as it might seem, according to Warren. But this year's Governor General's jury nominated two, ultimately choosing Cool Water over Regina author Sandra Birdsell's severely naturalistic Waiting for Joe.
On the non-fiction side, Saskatoon's Alan Casey beat out both Ian Brown's much-awarded The Boy in the Moon and John English's Just Watch Me with Lakeland: Journeys into the Soul of Canada. Inspired by the overdevelopment of cottage country in central Saskatchewan, Lakeland examines and questions the desecration of similar landscapes across the country in prose the three-person panel of judges described as "gentle, exquisite and sometimes playful."
Also a newcomer to the literary limelight, Casey, 49, is a journalist who wrote Lakeland to "start a discussion that still hasn't happened yet." Defining the essence of Canada as "easy access to relatively pristine areas" - the shores of freshwater lakes in particular - Casey warns that the privilege is quickly disappearing. "Whether we use it as much as we want to, we really like knowing it's there," he said. "And it's becoming a wealthy neighbourhood."
Other winners announced in Montreal Tuesday include poet Richard Greene of Cobourg, Ont., a professor at the University of Toronto, for Boxing the Compass, a volume inspired in part by a long bus journey into the United States. Newfoundland playwright Robert Chafe took the drama award for Afterimage, a play about a girl with the gift of prescience.
The awards for English-language children's literature went to Wendy Phillips of Richmond, B.C. for the text of Fishtailing, and to Jon Klassen on Niagara Falls, Ont., for the illustrations to Cat's Night Out. One French-language children's book, Rose: derrière le rideau de la folie, was honoured twice, for Elise Turcotte's text and again for Daniel Sylvestre's illustrations - a first in the history of the awards.
Other French-language winners included Vietnamese-born Kim Thúy of Longeuil for Ru, set during the fall of South Vietnam and described by the Governor-General's judges as "an exemplary autobiographical novel," and Montreal poet Daniel le Fournier for effleurés de lumière. Historian Michel Lavoie won the non-fiction award for C'est ma seigneurie que je réclame: la lutte des Hurons de Lorette pour la seigneurie de Sillery, 1650-1900.