Nino Ricci won Canada’s Governor General’s award for fiction for his just-published novel ORIGIN OF SPECIES, and journalist Christie Blatchford won the non-fiction award for her book FIFTEEN DAYS: Stories of Bravery, Friendship, Life and Death from Inside the New Canadian Army. (Both titles were edited by Doubleday Canada Editorial Director Martha Kanya-Forstner.)
Rawi Hage’s COCKROACH was the only work of fiction nominated for all three of Canada’s top fiction prizes, but failed to win any of the top honors. Click below for all 14 Governor General winners (with prizes for writing in both English and French).
CBC
In the UK, one-time Booker favorite Sebastian Barry has been nominated for the Costa
fiction award, competing with Louis de Bernières’s A Partisan’s
Daughter; Chris Cleave’s The Other Hand; and Patrick McGrath’s Trauma.
Given in five categories, the Costas include a first novel prize, which
includes Tom Rob Smith’s Child 44 and Sadie Jones’s The Outcast.
Complete list of nominees
Meanwhile, tonight’s National Book Award ceremonies have been greeted quietly among news organizations and blogs in recent days. Time reminders readers of the awards’ mission: “The goal of the awards ever since has remained essentially the same, and in 1989 became the principle behind its corresponding organization, the National Book Foundation: to bring unheralded literature to national recognition, and to promote literacy in underserved communities throughout the United States. The award’s impact, however, seems to be felt most within the publishing world itself.”
If you aren’t attending the NBF has promised that “tweets of the National Book Awards Winners will be sent around 9:30 p.m. EST, after each judge announces the Winner in Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry and Young People’s Literature.” Just follow http://twitter.com/nationalbook.