TORONTO – Esteemed Toronto author Nino Ricci recalls having “very low” expectations when his debut novel, “Lives of the Saints,” was published in 1990.
He had a small publisher, the initial print run was a mere 1,500 copies, and his book readings were rather sparsely attended.
“I can remember I had a reading … in Winnipeg, and it happened to coincide with the same night that a very popular fantasy writer had a reading in Winnipeg. He apparently had 600 people at his reading. I had about six at my reading,” Ricci, 52, says with a chuckle during a telephone interview from his home.
“But two of the people there were (authors) Sandra Birdsell and Carol Shields, and I thought, ‘Well, at least I’ve got the cream of the crop here.'”
Turned out Birdsell was on the jury for that year’s $10,000 Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction, which was ultimately awarded to Ricci for “Lives of the Saints.”
Suddenly Ricci was the toast of literary circles at home and abroad, with “Lives of the Saints” turning into a bestseller that came to be published in nearly 20 countries.
“The period following the award was when the book really reached a larger public consciousness, so it was important to me just in terms of the income that it brought to me and the ability it gave me to keep writing,” says Ricci, who turned the book into a heralded trilogy.
“And it was certainly important in the credibility right out of the starting gate, to get that kind of affirmation as a writer.”
The annual Governor General’s Literary Awards – administered by the Canada Council for the Arts – have been giving similar boosts to Canadian authors for 75 years now, with the 2011 winners to be announced on Tuesday.
Established in 1936 by the Canadian Authors Association, the awards are said to be Canada’s oldest prizes for English-language and French-language Canadian literature.
Up until 1994, when the Scotiabank Giller Prize was founded, the GG fiction award was the only honour of its kind in Canada.
“It was really ‘the’ award,” says Ricci, who won the honour again in 2008 for “The Origin of Species.”
In the early days, the GG Awards honoured English-language books only in two categories – fiction and non-fiction – and there was no monetary prize. Over the years, a cash value was added along with more categories, including French-language.
Today, the GG awards give $25,000 each to English-language and French-language winners in seven categories: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama, children’s literature-text, children’s literature-illustration, and translation.
The publisher of each winning book receives $3,000 to support promotional activities. Non-winning finalists each receive $1,000, bringing the total value of the awards to about $450,000.
“I think that what distinguishes the Governor General’s awards is … the seven categories and the two languages,” says Joanne Larocque-Poirier, head of Endowments and Prizes for the Canada Council.
“It’s a national success story: it has a very high level of public recognition, it has the prestige of the governor general’s title attached to the awards … but I think most important, they are widely accepted within the writing and publishing community as a legitimate, meaningful and important mark of excellence.”
The Canada Council’s writing and publishing section puts the GG juries together, choosing participants based on a number of factors, including regional balance, cultural diversity and a lack of conflict of interest, said Larocque-Poirier.
Unlike some other prizes, the GG awards have no cap on the amount of works publishers can submit for consideration.
Other past winners of the GG Awards include Bertram Brooker, Emily Carr, Mordecai Richler, Morley Callaghan and E.J. Pratt.
Hugh MacLennan and Michael Ondaatje have both won the GG fiction award a record five times apiece (because he’s won so many times, Ondaatje did not to submit his new novel for consideration this year).
Ricci, who was invested in the Order of Canada earlier this month, recalls fantasizing about winning a GG fiction prize when his librarian friend invited him to the ceremony for the winners in 1989.
“I had been sitting in the audience thinking, ‘Oh, I sure hope that one day I’m able to get up on that stage,’ and feeling quite small and insignificant at the event and just sort of hovering in a back corner,” he says.
“It had this kind of glamour for me, just from having been there that year, and from having known about it years before. And that certainly increased the specialness of the award when it came.”
This year’s GG fiction finalists include Victoria-based Esi Edugyan for “Half-Blood Blues” (Thomas Allen Publishers), winner of last week’s Giller prize; and Vancouver Island native Patrick deWitt for “The Sisters Brothers” (House of Anansi Press), which recently nabbed the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.
Toronto author and filmmaker David Bezmozgis is nominated for “The Free World” (HarperCollins Publishers), which was also on the Giller short list.
The GG fiction list is rounded out by Edmonton’s Marina Endicott for “The Little Shadows” (Doubleday Canada) and Kitchener, Ont., native Alexi Zentner for his first novel, “Touch” (Alfred A. Knopf Canada).
Winners will receive their awards, as well as a hand-crafted leather-bound copy of their books, from at a ceremony at Rideau Hall on Nov. 24.
Ricci says his leather-bound copies of his GG-winning works are prominently displayed in his office.
“I look up at them from time to time and take them out,” he says.
“They also come in boxes. I’ll take them out of the box and finger their leather and feel happy.”
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