Jan. 11, 2012 - Issue #847: The great indoors

More than an honour

As the literary conversation shrinks, award nominations take on a new importance

It's no surprise that winning a major literary award can give a writer's career a shot in the arm.
Consider the case of Esi Edugyan, whose sophomore novel Half-Blood Blues swept up last year's Scotiabank Giller Prize, the glitziest literary award this country has to offer. There are now more than 115 000 copies in print worldwide.

But, interestingly enough, it wasn't winning the Giller that brought Edugyan to the nation's attention. It wasn't its fairy-tale road to publication, either. (The book was rescued from the brink of oblivion by Thomas Allen when Edugyan's original publisher went under in early 2011.)

No, what made Canadians really sit up and take notice was the three-week window last fall when Edugyan and Patrick deWitt, author of The Sisters Brothers, were both shortlisted for all three major Canadian literary awards—the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, the Governor General's Award for English-language fiction, and the Giller—as well as the ultra-high-profile Man Booker Prize, which is open to citizens of the British Commonwealth.

The common denominator being the shortlist, rather than the winner's circle—and if this was once unexpected, it isn't anymore. With the Canadian media's coverage of books becoming increasingly sporadic, fewer titles each season are able to distinguish themselves from the pack, and awards are being forced to shoulder more and more of the cultural conversation. As a result, the shortlist has emerged as one of the few remaining tools for keeping multiple books on the nation's radar at one time.

That's a far cry from even a decade ago. When Edmonton-via-Cape Breton Island's Lynn Coady published her first novel, Strange Heaven, in 1998, she remembers joining a literary conversation that was far more vibrant than it is today.

"There was more media around book culture, and more attention paid," she says.

Strange Heaven landed a surprise nomination for a Governor General's award, and Coady went from being an unknown Maritime writer to a national prospect overnight. Agents came calling. So did major publishers. "I even experienced bidding wars, which is crazy," she says. "Not into six figures or anything, but anything over $500 was gobsmacking to me. I definitely felt like I had bridged a gap that otherwise would've taken me 10 years to cross."

Since then, Coady says award culture has only gotten larger, "whereas book culture in general has shrunk."

She's right on both counts. Every year, dozens of prizes and hundreds of thousands of dollars are handed out to authors across the country. For local writers, there's the newly rechristened Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize (with a purse of $10 000), plus the nine genre-spanning prizes administered by the Alberta Literary Awards. And thanks to some recent changes to its eligibility, the Alberta Readers' Choice Award (also $10 000) is now open to anyone who lives in the province.

The vast majority of attention, however, is reserved for just four national awards: the aforementioned trifecta of fiction prizes—the Rogers Writers' Trust ($25 000), the Governor General's Award ($25 000), and the Giller ($50 000)—as well as CBC Radio's celebrity-backed, elimination-style Canada Reads competition, which doesn't come with any cash prize.

Yet even here, it's the announcement of the prizes' shortlists, rather than their respective winners, that's becoming the true flashpoint. That's because a shortlist (usually five or six titles) accomplishes several tasks usually shouldered by a diverse and critical mainstream media. It gives casual readers a manageable, pre-approved reading list for the coming year. It gives active readers an agreed-upon set of titles to dissect, debate, vigorously praise, or vigorously damn in the weeks before the winner is announced. And it gives a select group of authors and publishers extremely lucrative opportunities for national exposure.
 

Those opportunities are felt especially strongly here in Edmonton, whose literary community is isolated in more ways than one.

Paul Matwychuk is the general manager of NeWest Press, a local independent publisher of literary fiction, poetry, and drama. Last year NeWest pulled off the feat—unprecedented for a press of its size and reach—of landing titles in both the Giller longlist and in Canada Reads.

"The Canada Reads thing was major," Matwychuk says. "Our sales more than doubled last year, and that was almost entirely because of [Angie Abdou's novel] The Bone Cage." Their entry to the Giller, Myrna Dey's Extensions, experienced a smaller bump. "But maybe that's the difference between a longlist and a shortlist."

NeWest also had a book, Thomas Wharton's Icefields, in Canada Reads back in 2008. Matwychuk hopes that, combined, all of these points of visibility will lead to more national coverage for future NeWest titles.

"You can get a readership in Alberta, but you can't really live on it," says Todd Babiak. The novelist and former Edmonton Journal culture columnist says that, even in 2012, the publishing industry's radar is still mostly confined to the Greater Toronto Area. Anyone who lives beyond those limited borders has to find other ways to call attention to the work they're doing—"and awards are probably the most magical way to do it."

Babiak is also no stranger to that magic. Like Coady, his first book (2000's Choke Hold) was put out by a small regional publisher and subsequently launched into the national spotlight thanks to a major award nomination—in Babiak's case, the Rogers Writers' Trust.

Since then, his novels have netted him the City of Edmonton and Georges Bugnet awards, among others. But the prize that's had by far the biggest impact on Babiak's career is another one that he didn't win. That'd be the Giller, for which The Garneau Block was longlisted in 2006, and which Babiak says also carries by far the most weight with your average Canadian.

"When someone is introducing me at a literary event or something, that's the one that people nod at," he adds. "'Oh, Giller! Look at you, Giller!'"

Coady echoes that sentiment. Her most recent novel, The Antagonist, was shortlisted for the Giller last year, which means she got to attend the televised gala at the Four Seasons in Toronto and witness the glamour firsthand.

"There were luminaries there who had nothing to do with publishing," Coady remembers. "Barbara Amiel was there, Robbie Robertson, Rick Mercer, the opera singer Measha Brueggergosman. All there in their de la Renta gowns, looking and being fabulous, because it was the place to be.
"That fascinated me!" she adds. "You think Canadian literature, you don't think that."

(During the event itself, Coady snuck off several times to send self-deprecating Tweets from the bathroom, the last of which read, "OH GODDAMNIT MY BRA HAS BEEN SHOWING THIS WHOLE TIME.")

Data compiled by BookNet Canada shows that the Giller also has the largest impact on sales of any prize in the country. In 2010, sales on average tripled for each of the shortlisted titles in the week following the announcement. And its impact is only growing with each passing year.
Coady and Babiak both vouch for this so-called Giller Effect, even for those titles that don't take home the prize. Immediately after being shortlisted in 2006, Babiak's Garneau Block went into a second printing. And last fall foreign rights for The Antagonist were sold in three different territories, more than for any of Coady's previous novels. She expects others will follow shortly.
 

One controversial new wrinkle in Canada's awards culture is the readers' choice category, whereby nominees are determined via online poll. Last year's Canada Reads started with an audience-generated 40-book longlist of what they deemed to be the "most essential" Canadian novels of the past decade; one spot on the most recent Giller longlist was also reserved for the winner of a readers' poll. Both of NeWest's nominated titles, The Bone Cage and Extensions, were readers' choice selections.

The problem with this process, of course, is that it can be easily hijacked by those authors and publishers who have the largest, or else the most insistent, online networks of followers, friends, and readers to mobilize.

And it doesn't make things any easier for authors, either, who are now faced with an unwelcome new dilemma. Do they take on this new self-publicist role, and campaign as hard as they can to get on these readers' choice lists? Or does that run the risk of seeming desperate, not to mention feeling, as Coady puts it, "skeezy" with themselves?

"All of a sudden you saw writers going hat in hand to everybody and their social worker in a way that seemed really unseemly to me," she says. "It felt like my fellow writers were being exploited. That's my gut feeling."

"When I'm included on one of those things," agrees Babiak, "I think, 'Oh God, now I have to go out there on social media and tell my friends and followers.' I despise it. Every time it arrives, I feel sick." At the same time, he knows his publisher would prefer it if he did join in. "And gosh, what else am I doing it for? I'm writing books to be read. If I can find a wider readership, that's fantastic."
He adds, after a pause, "I sit and think about this all the time."

From a publisher's perspective, however, Matwychuk argues that the readers' choice category does still have the potential to bring fresh voices to the conversation that might otherwise go unheard. He says getting Extensions on the Giller longlist was "a nice vindication," since "it had been basically ignored by reviewers across the country. It wasn't that it got bad reviews; it was that it got almost no major reviews whatsoever."

As for the fear, voiced by many critics, that an overly aggressive publisher could force one of their books through on the readers' choice ballot, then shout "longlisted for the Giller Prize" all the way to the bank? Matwychuk quickly lays those fears to rest.

"We didn't do anything at all with the reprints of Extensions," he admits with a laugh. In their push to get copies of the book out as quickly as possible, NeWest didn't even have time to attach a promotional sticker on the front, let alone undertake a top-to-bottom redesign.

In fact, the word Giller doesn't appear anywhere on the book's cover—though you can bet that's going to change soon enough.

No matter how big a magnifying glass you apply to the changing face of awards culture, one fact rings loud and clear above all others: literary prizes sell books. Lots of them. In fact, they're one of the few things that still can.

But, as Coady points out, literature is hardly the only field in which customers need a hand to find the really good stuff.

"When I'm at DeVine Wines," she says, by way of comparison, "I look for the wines with the little medals on them." Accordingly, "People who don't consider themselves conversant with the world of Canadian publishing are always looking for these little cues of what might be good."

And with more than 20 000 titles being published in Canada every year, really, can you blame them? vueweekly.com comments: powered by Disqus