Cameron Nominated for Arthur Ellis Award

Posted 2 May, 2008 in Awards | No comments

Heartfelt congratulations go out to novelist and TSR fave Claire Cameron, whose novel The Line Painter has been nominated for an Arthur Ellis Award by the Crime Writers of Canada.

A full list of this year’s nominees can be found here.

Oranges vs. Bananas Redux

Posted 17 April, 2008 in Awards | 1 comment

Remember the post in which I jokingly suggested the outrage that would accrue to the creation of a male-only literary prize as a counterweight to the female-only Orange Prize? Seems this idea has been seriously floated … by one of the shortlisted authors for this year’s Orange Prize:

ONE of the six authors shortlisted for the women-only Orange Prize yesterday backed calls for a new literary award – for men.

Sadie Jones was speaking after critics of the 12-year-old prize complained loudly of sex discrimination. A men’s prize could help get more boys reading, she said.

While I don’t believe that a male-only prize is the way to get boys reading, it’s interesting to note that the article that Jones’s comments appear in points out that the British publishing industry is dominated by women and women make up the majority of book buyers, so the Orange Prize may be having a positive effect.

On the other hand, from what I know of the Canadian publishing industry, although it is predominantly composed of women, proportionally few of those workers are in upper management, which is still largely an old boy’s club. So there’s a way to go before we reach parity.

And — just in case anyone thinks I’m trying to open another Pandora’s Box here — I don’t think that a male-only prize is necessary (or even desirable) at this point. (In fact, if you really want to know, I’m of the mind that there are already far too many literary prizes out there. We need to scale back on their number, not continue to add more. But that’s a controversy for another day.)

In related news, Panic Girl has some nice things to say about your humble correspondent over at her site, and she links to another piece that articulately argues for the continued relevance of the Orange Prize, in this case by deconstructing the Tim Lott article that started the whole fracas in the first place.

Giller? We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Giller

Posted 2 April, 2008 in Awards | No comments

Rawi Hage’s novel De Niro’s Game has made the shortlist for the IMPAC award. The full list is here.

TMN Tournament of Books Winner

Posted 31 March, 2008 in Awards | No comments

The Morning News 2008 Tournament of Books is over, and the champion, beating out Tom McCarthy’s Remainder in the final round, is Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wonderful Life of Oscar Wao. Of all the judge’s recommendations and comments about this book, Elizabeth McCracken’s hits closest to the mark for me:

ELIZABETH McCRACKEN: Perhaps all judgments should be present in the form of a disclaimer: When presented with two deeply weird, hellaciously inventive books, I will always choose the one that makes me laugh out loud.

Oranges vs. Bananas, or, The One in Which Yr. Humble Correspondent Gets Himself into a Whole Heap o’ Trouble

Posted 24 March, 2008 in Awards | 14 comments

The longlist for the Orange Prize has been announced, and, not for the first time, it has caused some controversy by provoking cries of sexism. That’s right: sexism. The Orange Prize, you see, is open only to women, which has prompted some critics to label it exclusionary and unnecessary.

These critics may not be the ones you assume they are. Knee-jerk antifeminists (you know who you are *cough* Christopher Hitchens *cough*) are easy targets, but when charges of sexism come from writers such as the prolific, award-winning, and (not incidentally) female A.S. Byatt and Anita Brookner, you know something interesting is going on.

Byatt told the Times that the Orange prize is “sexist,” and went on to say, “Such a prize was never needed.” She feels so strongly about the matter that she has refused to allow her books to stand for nomination. Brookner decries the prize’s positive discrimination, and the Times claims that she “is also believed” to have disallowed her novels to stand for nomination. The Orange Prize carries a cash award of £30,000; the decision not to let one’s work stand for nomination is a clear case of putting one’s money where one’s mouth is. At least it can never be said that these authors lack the courage of their convictions.

Panic Girl, for one, is not convinced. Calling the arguments against the Orange Prize “boring” and “rage-inducing,” she suggests that the award is needed “until women are equal players in the world.” This reads like the doctrinaire pro-feminist position, the same way that Byatt’s accusation of sexism reads like the doctrinaire anti-feminist position (the mere fact that someone is in possession of a double-X chromosome does not ipso facto render that person a feminist, at least not always).

On the one hand, it’s easy to agree with Panic Girl’s point of view. A quick scan of Western history will indicate that much of it has been devoted to campaigns among the empowered (read: white men) to keep the powerless (read: women and minorities) down. Still, it’s hard not to sympathize with Byatt and Brookner, although perhaps not for their stated reasons.

The arguments in favour of the Orange Prize inevitably point to the lack of representation of women among the large “unisex” prizes such as the Man Booker Prize or the Scotiabank Giller Prize — both of which, I hesitate to point out, were won last year by women: Anne Enright and Elizabeth Hay, respectively. The 2007 Costa award also went to a woman (A.L. Kennedy), as did the Books in Canada/Amazon.ca First Novel Award (Madeline Thien) and the Governor General’s Literary Awards for English Non-Fiction and English Drama (Karolyn Smardz Frost and Colleen Murphy, respectively).

It’s hard to tell whether a bias against women exists among prize juries. One could note that in the fourteen years of its existence, the Giller Prize has be won by men ten times (including the year 2000, when it was effectively won twice by men — David Adams Richards and Michael Ondaatje tied). But it’s unclear whether this points to a systemic attempt to prevent women from storming the barricades of CanLit, or whether the sample size is too small to get an accurate picture of the literary landscape.

But this perceived systemic bias against women — the idea that “the playing field is still not level” — is a red herring, in my opinion, when it comes to the Orange Prize. So too is the charge that the prize fosters a reverse bias against men. Although one can easily imagine the furor that would erupt should someone decide to launch a competing prize — let’s call it the Banana Prize — open exclusively to writers in possession of a Y-chromosome, this line of argument tends to obscure the real issue.

The compelling argument against the exclusionary nature of the Orange Prize, it seems to me, is that it implicitly insults women. This is a facet of the prize that the doctrinaire feminist line elides. The prize insults women by suggesting that they are not capable of playing in the big leagues, and need a special award all to themselves for validation.

Notwithstanding Panic’s assertion that one should avoid comparisons between sexism and racism, the argument here is really much the same as that which could be made against the Toronto District School Board’s recent decision to fund an Afro-centric school in Toronto. The implicit assumption on the part of the TDSB is that Afro-Canadians are incapable of getting ahead in the public system and so must be placed in an environment that gives them an edge, in which they don’t have to compete with people from other cultures or backgrounds. This, to me, flies in the face of everything that the Civil Rights protesters of the ’60s — not to mention the U.S. Supreme Court in its landmark ruling Brown v. Board of Education — achieved. This mentality belittles Afro-Canadians by assuming that they are inherently less able to compete in a public school environment than is everybody else.

Similarly, by hiving off female writers and claiming that they need an award of their own, the proponents of the Orange Prize implicitly suggest that Heather O’Neill, Nancy Huston, and Deborah Moggoach aren’t capable of being measured against Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, and Kazuo Ishiguro. This, I submit, is a sexist assumption. O’Neill, Huston, and Moggoach have every claim to be counted not among the best female writers working today, but the best writers, period. This is where the Orange Prize comes up short.

Feminism, in my understanding, was always supposed to be about equality. One needn’t look too hard or too deep to realize that equality of the sexes is not something that we’ve achieved yet; women still face undeniable discrimination professionally, domestically, and socially. Still, it’s hard to see how a literary award that implicitly separates women writers from the front lines of literary distinction will help much in this regard.

Hill, Richardson Win Commonwealth Prizes

Posted 14 March, 2008 in Awards | No comments

Heartfelt congratulations go out to Lawrence Hill and C.S. Richardson, who both won Commonwealth Prizes in the Canada and Caribbean region:

In the Canada and Caribbean region, Best Book went to Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes, the true story of one woman’s journey from her village in west Africa, through slavery in South Carolina to a hard-won liberation. CS Richardson won Best First Book with The End of the Alphabet, the story of a man who develops a rage for travel after hearing he has only weeks to live.

I haven’t read either of these, but a Canadian publishing insider whose opinion I trust calls The Book of Negroes “a masterpiece,” so perhaps I should give it a go.

The rest of the Commonwealth winners can be found here.

Díaz Scoops NBCC Award

Posted 7 March, 2008 in Awards | No comments

Junot Díaz won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction last night for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Time will tell whether this gives him a leg up in the upcoming Tournament of Books. The general nonfiction award went to Harriet Washington for Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. The complete list of winners is available here.