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The Canada Council for the Arts today announced the winners of the 2011 Governor General's Literary Awards. The winners of the English awards are:

Fiction:
Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt
Nonfiction:
Mordecai: The Life and Times by Charles Foran
Poetry:
Killdeer by Phil Hall

Drama:
If We Were Birds by Erin Shields
Children's Text:
From Then to Now by Christopher Moore
Children's Illustration:
Ten Birds by Cybele Young

Esi Edugyan was awarded the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize tonight for her novel Half Blood Blues.

"Imagine Mozart were a black German trumpet player and Salieri a bassist, and 18th century Vienna were WWII Paris; that's Esi Edugyan's joyful lament, Half-Blood Blues. It's conventional to liken the prose in novels about jazz to the music itself, as though there could be no higher praise. In this case, say rather that any jazz musician would be happy to play the way Edugyan writes," the jury said in its citation.

The award was handed out at a black-tie gala in Toronto. The other nominees were Michael Ondaatje for Cat's Table, David Bezmozgis for The Free World, Lynn Coady for The Antagonist, Zsuzsi Gartner for Better Living through Plastic Explosives, and Patrick DeWitt for Sisters Brothers. The Scotiabank Giller Prize honours the best in Canadian English-language fiction.

 

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The Sisters Brothers$22.95 add to cart

Patrick DeWitt has won the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize for his genre-bending novel, The Sisters Brothers.

The Sisters Brothers was cited by the jury as masterful and mesmerizing in its exploration of the blurred lines between good and evil. "This is the sort of material that, in lesser hands, could easily have sunk into middling farce, but deWitt's portrayal of the homicidal brothers and the quixotic roster of characters thrown in their path is fresh, moving, insightful, and always funny. Cinematic in its scope, meditative in its tone and brilliantly inventive in its characterization, The Sisters Brothers is a book unlike any you may read during this or the coming years. Unforgettable."

We can vouch for the merits of the book too as it caught the enthusiastic attention of several of our booksellers upon the novel's release last June. Since then several other booksellers have read it and the response has been unanimously positive. We highly recommend it.

The winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize for Fiction has been announced. Julian Barnes has been awarded the £50,000 award for The Sense of an Ending, published in Canada by Knopf Canada.