Could a New Yorker Win Canada’s Top Literary Prize?

By Neal 

rivka-galchen-withcover.jpgThe nominees for this year’s Governor General’s Literary Awards, which are pretty much the Canadian equivalent of the National Book Awards or the Man Booker Prize except with separate categories for books written in English and French, were announced earlier today, and one of the nominees in the English-language fiction category is Rivka Galchen‘s debut novel, Atmospheric Disturbances. Although Galchen lives in New York City, she’s originally from Toronto, and that’s all she needs for eligibility—and before you suggest, well, they’d never actually give it to someone who didn’t live in the country, consider Peter Behrens, who expatriated from Montreal to Maine and picked up the 2006 fiction prize. Or 2003 winner Douglas Glover, who emigrated to upstate New York from Ontario. We’re just saying, it could happen! (Also, we freely admit, it’s the only one of the five nominees we’ve actually read, although considering that three of the other four come from Doubleday Canada, we’re sorta curious now who the keen, perceptive editor over there is, snapping up all that literary fiction.)

On a side note, the prize is now officially known as the GGs and are not at all the funny awkward little prize Canadians knew—overnight, there’s been a breathless change in how they perceive the award!