The Colophon

“When you look back in fifty years on the great writers in Canadian literature, I think he’s going to have to be included in that.”

Even in a year fraught with anxiety and discord, writers connected with readers to provide succour, solace, entertainment, and provocation.

Maysam Abu Khreibeh, a Palestinian writer and organizer, called the 2023 protest the “bare minimum” that could be done to push back against the ongoing conflict in Gaza

“I think the preservation of administrative salaries at the upper echelons is the priority.”

Sheung-King’s win completes the trifecta for Penguin Random House Canada, which published each of the three big fiction prize winners this year.

The counter-gala was organized by CanLit Responds and the activist group No Arms in the Arts.

Gordon Hill purchased PQL and will become a vertically integrated unit – a single company with two imprints.

M&S had a good day, also taking home the nonfiction prize in English.

“I think the majority of us – left, centre, right, whatever – are interested in finding a way out of this.”

There is ambiguity here, but also a plaintive recognition of very human emotions that are often denied or ignored by people frightened by their complexity or contradictions.

“It’s clear that the lines between what is public and what’s private has been blurred,” said Elana Rabinovitch.

“I would turn your attention back to the role of literature in situations like this, which is to interrogate hate and certitude and ideas that people are conflicted about.”

Sharp shares with Jon Klassen an affection for macabre conclusions in which the story’s villain gets an exaggerated, though not unwarranted, comeuppance.

“The problem in this country is that people seem to feel that if it’s funny it’s not serious.”

With fully three-fifths of the nominations, the Giller shortlist continues the hot streak for Penguin Random House Canada.

Also of note is the publication dates of these books, none of which was published after February 2024.

Maillard says he was “moved … humbled and grateful” to find out he had received the award.

For a writer who notably eschews the aesthetic approaches involved in social realism, Kilworthy Tanner is his most reader-friendly work to date.

The two other nominees for this year’s prize also appear on the Giller longlist.

The most blazingly unforgettable tale in the anthology has to be EC Dorgan’s “Prairie Teeth.”

A reader like Brand, we understand, is someone who has never felt represented in the literature presented to her as the great and enduring work of the past.

The campaign of intimidation has led to the Giller Foundation taking the extraordinary step of releasing a public plea for the harassment to end.

The refusal to cut ties with Scotiabank but merely suppress its name in public is likely to further inflame those who feel the association with the bank is a moral stain on the prize.

As a commercial novel about the ultra-rich, The Plus One wants to have it both ways.

Siebert’s empathetic approach to her material is admirable and she has the capacity for cutting observation.

The chimes between Europe of the 1930s and American in the 2010s and early 2020s are clear and persuasive.

Jones’s preference for selecting elder statesmen and women generally omits a broad range of voices that have helped push Canadian poetry out of the confines of its colonial past.

The Newfoundland of Vigil is an unforgiving place, and Taylor treats it, along with her cast of characters, without an ounce of sentimentality.

Owen is a lyric poet who delights in working within traditional forms.

The subtextual question in each of these stories – Where, exactly, does the true horror reside? – is a provocative and pressing one.

Giller will operate with a three-person jury for the first time since 2014.

Dismantling systems of arts funding in a capitalist society is notoriously difficult.

The signatories are calling for the Giller to lobby Scotiabank to fully divest from Elbit Systems and for the prize to sever ties with the Azrieli Foundation, Indigo, and Audible.

The article in the Star is heartbreaking.

Both volumes contain references to the Hebrew word “hineni,” translated as “here I am.”

The stories in Dance of the Happy Shades establish many of the characteristics that would come to be associated with Munro’s oeuvre.

Ontological queries pervade the novel, which is, at least in part, about the inability to outrun violence or harmful past experience.

The plot, which unfolds at a frantic pace, comes to resemble an M.C. Escher sketch.

Canadians have a choice between a hyper-partisan Trumpian polarizer and a performative, gaffe-prone incumbent.

The irony in the volume stretches across stories, a number of which are linked.

“I’ve always been interested in why people make the choices they make,” Botha says.

Segriff’s preferred mode is realism.

The real, physical world is ever-present in these stories, most particularly in a recurring theme focusing on women’s bodies.

One need only read a few sentences of Munro’s writing to understand that one is in the presence of literary genius.

The best stories in the book are less assiduous in cuing their reader as to how to react in any given moment.

Characters in Blaise’s fiction are constantly on the move.

A number of these stories focus on military families. But the broader theme is the status of women and their struggle for independence and autonomy.

Governmental intransigence has been fuelled, Lane believes, by the mainstream media

The approach to poetry and the world is tinged with surrealism and not a small dollop of humour

Blue Runaways is the first fiction publication from Stonehewer Books, a new independent press out of Victoria, B.C.

The stories in Last Woman have their finger on the pulse of the current zeitgeist.

Broadly speaking, the novel operates in the mode of metafiction.

What this amounts to is less fiction than a kind of erasure poetry.

Rowland suggests we need to re-emphasize our human predilection for moral action and goodness.

These are stories that are honest enough to meet their characters on their own terms.

The stories here are entertaining enough, provocative enough, and spicy enough that their ultimate provenance doesn’t really make any difference.

I have come down with Covid. New posts will resume once I’m feeling a bit better.

The individual entries are linked by characters that drift in and out among them.

These are books that made an impression on me.

Regardless of the narrative mode Verghese chooses, her thematic focus remains relatively constant.

Sam Wiebe and S.A. Cosby are among the leading practitioners of a new strain of noir fiction.

Protesters gathered outside 52 Division in downtown Toronto to call for the charges against the eleven to be dropped.

In addition to the prizes for individual works, several prizes for a body of work were also handed out.

The Giller protesters also received support on social media.

Estima infuses her writing with sensitivity for the barbed points of human interaction.

Yara represents Berger’s most fully realized vision yet.

One of Lamey’s qualities in this volume is a willingness to entertain multiple sides of a debate.

Toronto independent House of Anansi Press did very well at this year’s awards.

Egg Poets is the collective name of a quintet of writers.

Whittington-Hill incisively illustrates the various double standards women face as figures in the public eye.

“We feel now is the perfect time to develop and publish this anthology.”

The last of the big three shortlists to be announced, the GGs will be the first to unveil their winners, on November 8.

“The intent of the book felt very particular.”

Klein’s sprawling, anxious, scattershot approach to her material offers an objective correlative of what she claims was her mental state leading up to the writing of the book.

“My next task is to figure out how to do audiobooks.”

Other considerations aside, this represents one of the strongest Giller shortlists in years.

The more obviously generic elements of the story are less unsettling than the very real horrors of racism and family strife.

Only one writer on this year’s list, Emma Donoghue, has won the prize previously.

Indigo can’t fail, but it also appears less and less interested in operating primarily as a bookseller.

Twelve titles in total made the 2023 longlist, which was culled from a record-setting 145 submissions.

City in Flames and Camp Zero address societal discord via imaginative scenarios that only slightly exaggerated from the evening news.

The Marigold is a quintessential urban horror tale; The Handyman Method relocates the terror to the suburbs.

The stories display a surface placidity that belies their deeper structure.

LeBlanc’s short fiction is refreshingly resistant to closure.

The Canadian situation is in stark contrast to other Western countries that have more robust copyright protections.

“He was profoundly intelligent, but quite quiet. It was sometimes hard to know what he was thinking.”

“It’s very important to me that we look forward and thrive and that we signal stability to the market,” says Anansi president Semareh Al-Hillal.

“I look forward to putting my own stamp on a storied house,” says Brochu.

Troll is not a book liable to find a wide mainstream audience.

The core of the novel has a propulsion and a dramatic weight that works in its favour.

If there is a God hovering over Harmer’s narrative, it is of the Old Testament variety.

As a poet, Cayley is particularly good at juxtaposition often manifested as subtle or not-so-subtle shifts in tone and tenor.

Plett is not content to let her story act as a didactic tale about cis intolerance.

In describing fire – its properties and its behaviour – Vaillant is at his most enthralling.

Porter’s story is as significant for what it leaves out as for what it includes.

Imagery involving implicit threat is threaded throughout the story.

“Doi Moi Beans” is a story about exploitation; not the obvious kind, but the subtle version.

The story operates in the subgenre that has typically become known as folk horror.

Camille Hernández-Ramdwar’s story addresses the nuances involved in the anti-vax movement via the eponymous character.

Barth, like Ross, writes in a highly ironic mode.