The
Governor General’s Award for Fiction winner was announced today: Guy Vanderhaeghe won for his collection of
short stories, Daddy Lenin and Other
Stories. The jury praised the book
as “the work of an assured writer who needs no pyrotechnics to keep us reading.
Each story is superbly crafted, razor-sharp, wickedly funny. The reader is carried along in the hands of a
master, a seasoned professional at the top of his game” (http://ggbooks.ca/books/fiction/english/daddy-lenin-and-other-stories).
Here’s a
description of the award-winning collection:
“Among these nine stories: A
teenage boy breaks out of the strict confines of his family, but his bid for
independence leads him in over his head.
An actor’s penchant for hiding behind a role, on and off stage, is
tested to the limits and what he comes to discover finally places him face to
face with the truth. With his mother
hospitalized for a nervous condition and his father away on long work stints, a
boy is sent to another family for his meals. His gradually building relationship with a
teenage daughter who has been left handicapped from polio opens unexpected
doors to the world. In the title story,
a middle-aged man re-meets his former adviser at university, a charismatic and
domineering professor dubbed Daddy Lenin.
As their tense reunion progresses, secrets from the past painfully
revise remembered events and threaten to topple the scaffolding of a marriage (http://www.amazon.ca/Daddy-Lenin-Other-Stories-Vanderhaeghe/dp/0771099142/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1446039227&sr=1-1&keywords=daddy+lenin).
This is
Vanderhaeghe’s third Governor General’s Literary Award; he won in 1982 for
another short story collection, Man
Descending, and in 1996 for The Englishman’s
Boy.
For
descriptions of the other finalists, check my blog of October 7.
Obviously, I know a good writer: in my October 6 blog, I featured Vanderhaeghe
and his frontier trilogy!
For further
information about the other six winners of the Governor General’s Literary
Awards in the various categories, check out http://ggbooks.ca/winners-english. And CBC has a great article about how
Vanderhaeghe wrote the award-winning stories:
http://www.cbc.ca/books/2015/05/guy-vanderhaeghe-how-i-wrote-daddy-lenin-and-other-stories.html.
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