Reading Project [25]: Reading Canada
***Important Update About Footnotes:
Books with only a Wiki page are now hyperlinked in the list. I’ll footnote only those with further references/links/razor-sharp comments from the flight deck. I’ll repeat this note in future notes for a while.
1.
My father’s father came from Port Dover, Ontario, Canada (north shore of Lake Erie). In the 1920s, he ran a business college [secretarial skills—shorthand, etc.] in Flint, Michigan. Due to political turmoil in my own home country, I inspected the requirements for Canadian citizenship. Turns out I can’t be grandfathered in.
My mother used to say of me, “You have a lot of Canadian in you. They’re a dour people.” [She made dour rhyme with pure.]
Be that as it may, Americans tend to find out a writer/artist/band is from Canada only after they’ve made it big in the States or won an international award. We love our Margaret Atwood, yet we don’t really think about Canadian Literature as a thing.
Besides Atwood and Alice Munro, how many Canadian writers can you name?
I’ll go first:
Farley Mowat (Never Cry Wolf), Robertson Davies (The Deptford Trilogy), Lucy Maud Montgomery (Anne of Green Gables), Emily St. John Mandel (Station Eleven), Miriam Toews (All My Puny Sorrows)1, Leonard Cohen (Beautiful Losers), Mordecai Richler (The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz) and then there’s um, there’s . . .
What about Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient)—born in Sri Lanka, has lived in Canada since the1960s) . . . or Emma Donoghue (Room)—born in Dublin, Canadian since the 1990s)?
What about writers you know but didn’t realize were Canadian—for me: Sheila Heti (How Should a Person Be?), Rawi Hage (Carnival), Cory Doctorow (many sci-fi novels)?
2.
Last year, I started working on a post called Reading the 1990s [we’d already had Reading the 1920s, Reading the 1930s] . . . but in no time I saw there were too many books to sift through. Chaos! Same thing’s happening here.
So today we’re going to focus on Canadian fiction published in the last decade, starting with the winners of Canada’s major literary awards, then look at some of the other nominees, and a few writers who’ve turned up elsewhere.
Major Canadian Literary Awards/Fiction:
The Giller Prize (formerly The Scotiabank Giller Prize): English-language fiction, $100,000 for winner; $10,000 for finalists.
Governor General’s Literary Awards: Fiction, Non-fiction, Poetry, Drama, Young People’s Literature, Translation. $25,000 for winners; $1,000 for finalists.
Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Prize (formerly Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize): $40,000 for winner; $5,000 for finalists.
RBC Bronwen Wallace Award: For emerging writers in poetry and short fiction.
CBC Short Story Award: $6000 for winner, $1000 for shortlist.
3.
Last ten winners of the Giller Prize:
2024 Held, Anne Michaels
2019 Reproduction, Ian Williams
2018 Washington Black, Esi Edugyan4
2017 Bellevue Square, Michael Redhill
Last ten winners of Governor General’s Award for Fiction:
2024: Empty Spaces, Jordan Abel
2023: Chrysalis [stories], Anuja Varghese
2022: Pure Colour, Sheila Heti
2021: Tainna: The Unseen Ones, Norma Dunning
2020: Five Little Indians, Michelle Good5
2019: Five Wives, Joan Thomas
2018: The Red Word, Sarah Henstra
2017: We’ll All Be Burnt in Our Beds Some Night, Joel Thomas Hynes
2016: Do Not Say We Have Nothing, Madeleine Thien
2015: Daddy Lenin and Other Stories, Guy Vanderhaeghe
Last Ten Winners of Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Prize (2015) Fiction:
2025: Endling, Maria Reva
2024: Batshit Seven, Sheung-King
2022: Some Hellish, Nicholas Herring6
2021: The Strangers, Katherena Vermette
2020: Ridgerunner, Gil Adamson
2019: Days by Moonlight, André Alexis
2018: Dear Evelyn, Kathy Page 7
2017: Brother, David Chariandy
2016 : Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains, Yasuko Thanh
Last Ten RBC Bronwen Wallace Award Winners:
2025: “Tombstone of a Tsaddik,” Jess Goldman
2024: “Like Rabbits,” Nayani Jensen
2023: “So Much More to Say,” Zak Jones
2022: “Watching, Waiting,” Teya Hollier
2021: “East City, Anna Ling Kaye
2020: “Six Things My Father Taught Me About Bears,” Leah Mol
2019: “Selections from Junebat,” John Elizabeth Stintzi
2018: “The Ermine Coat, Maria Reva
2016: “Wyatt Thurst,” Brendan Bowles
Last Ten CBC Short Story Award Winners:
2025: “You (Streetcar at Night),” Dorian McNamara
2024: “Old Bones,” Kate Gunn
2023: “Just a Howl,” Will Richter
2022: “Beneath the Softness of Snow,” Chanel M. Sutherland
2021: “Kids in Kindergarten,” Corinna Chong
2020: “Gibson,” Brenda Damen
2019: “Green Velvet,” Krzysztof Pelc
2018: “Lipstick Day,” Leah Mol
2017: “Witching,” Alix Hawley
2016: “Enigma,” David Huebert
International Dublin Literary Award: Canadian nominees
2025: The Adversary, Michael Crummey [winner]
2024: Haven, Emma Donoghue [shortlist]
2024: The Sleeping Car Porter, Suzette Mayr [shortlist]
2020: Washington Black, Esi Edugyan [shortlist]
Some observations:
Not much overlap—it seems unlikely that jurors made sure awards went to non-winners of other prizes; more likely just a diversity of opinion. More on this.8
Of the 46 writers above, I’ve read only two, and not these books listed: Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be? (2012) and Omar El Akkad, American War (2017). I recommend both.
I recognized the names of Michael Crummey, Anne Michaels, Souvankham Thammavongsa, Madeleine Thien, and Guy Vanderhaeghe, but have never read their writing. Everyone else was foreign to me. Why?
4.
Books Recommended by My Friend Traci Who Lives Way Up in B.C.:
Clara Callan, Richard B. Wright
February and This is How We Love, Lisa Moore
Oh, My Darling [stories], Shaena Lambert
The Pull of the Moon [stories], Julie Paul
The End of Me [flash fiction], John Gould
Hunger Moon, Traci Skuce
Medicine Walk, Richard Wagamese
Split Tooth, Tanya Tagaq
Twelve More from among the nominees:
The Future, Catherine Leroux (trans. by Susan Ouriou) (2024)
The Island of Forgetting, Jasmine Sealy (2022)
The Most Precious Substance on Earth, Shashi Bhat (2021)
Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club, Megan Gail Coles
Indians on Vacation, Thomas King (2020)
Greenwood, Michael Christie (2019)9
The Innocents, Michael Crummey (2019)
Beirut Hellfire Society, Rawi Hage (2019)
Forgiveness, Mark Sakamoto (2018)
Women Talking, Miriam Toews (2018)
Fifteen Dogs, André Alexis (2017)
Lost in September, Kathleen Winter (2017)
https://www.cbc.ca/books/canadareads
https://thegreatestbooks.org/the-greatest/contemporary/books/written-by/canadian/authors/from/1990/to/2025
https://www.cbc.ca/books/71-canadian-fiction-books-to-read-in-spring-2025-1.7443365
https://www.beyondthebookends.com/the-best-canadian-novels-by-canadian-authors/
5.
The Project/Challenge:
Part One: There are 50-odd books hotlinked in this post. Click on at least 20, read the intel, assemble your own Longlist [12-15 titles].
Read (at least) six (your shortlist], either back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back, or one per month for the next half-year.
Part Two: There are 20 stories linked in the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award and CBC Short Story Award sections. Read 6-8.
Extra credit: If any of the story writers you read have published collections, read one of those.
Toews: A favorite writer of mine since reading All My Puny Sorrows (two sisters). She won a wider readership with Women Talking (2018), which was filmed by Canadian actor/director, Sarah Polley [Rooney Mara, Frances McDormand, Claire Foy]—a very serious story, drugged rapes in a Mennonite community. After which she wrote the hilarious Fight Night (2021). Her newest work is a memoir, A Truce That Is Not Peace (2025).
Near as I can tell, you say her surname Tay-ves.
Pick a Colour: From Bookshop.org [if you need to buy books online, buy them here]:
Souvankham Thammavongsa was born in the Lao refugee camp in Nong Khai, Thailand, and was raised and educated in Toronto, where she now lives. She is the author of four poetry books; the short story collection How to Pronounce Knife, winner of the 2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize and 2021 Trillium Book Award, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and the novel Pick a Color, winner of the 2025 Scotiabank Giller Prize. Her stories have won an O. Henry Award and appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Granta, and NOON.
Omar El Akkad: Read about him via the link in the list. He was on my radar because of his 2017 novel, American War, a convincingly read near-future story of civil war on the character level. I’ll have to read this next one. Since then he’s published what the NYTimes calls a memoir/manifesto, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, which became a bestseller and won the National Book Award. [Great title!]
Washington Black: Historical, Wash Black’s escape from slavery. Rave reviews all around. Shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. Became a 2025 mini-series on Hulu.
Five Little Indians: From Wiki:
Five Little Indians was CBC‘s number one book recommendation in 2021. Amnesty International Book Club selected Five Little Indians for their book club in 2021. Now named Five Little Indians one of the top ten novels of 2020. The Globe and Mail, CBC, Kobo, and Indigo also named the book in their lists of the best books of the year.
The novel was selected for the 2022 edition of Canada Reads.
Some Hellish: Lobsterman, Prince Edward Island. Read about him here.
Overlap:
Some winners of one prize were shortlisted for another.
A few books were shortlisted for international prizes: Study for Obedience, Sarah Bernstein [2023 Booker]; Held, Anne Michaels [2024 Booker].
Christie: Blurbage: From the award-winning author of If I Fall, If I Die comes a propulsive, multigenerational family story, in which the unexpected legacies of a remote island off the coast of British Columbia will link the fates of five people over a hundred years. Cloud Atlas meets Barkskins in this ingenious nested-ring epic set against the devastation of the natural world.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
Longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize
Winner of the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Novel
Finalist for The BC Book Awards
Finalist for The Evergreen Award
An Indie Next Pick
Named one of CBC’s best books of 2019
Here's a link to the Carol Shields Prize site where you can read about Canisia Lubrin's Code Noir :
https://carolshieldsprizeforfiction.com/2025-shortlist
Pick A Colour, Endling, and Women Talking are on my TBR.