CanLit Adventure

Recently, I won three books in a contest run by Access Copyright, a not-for-profit agency with the mandate to ensure that Canadian authors, artists, and publishers receive fair compensation when their works are copied. The three books were all major award winners: Tamas Dobozy's Siege 13 (Thomas Allen, 2012), winner of the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, Will Ferguson's 419 (Viking, 2012), winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and Linda Spalding's The Purchase (McLelland and Stewart, 2012) winner of the Governor General's Prize for Fiction.

Now, let me be brutally honest about my relationship with Canadian literature. When I entered the contest, I had no idea of who these authors were, what they had written previously, or what works they had beaten out to win these prizes. Having attended high school in the 1960s, my introduction to CanLit was more in the nature of the force fed diet of standard works that typified pedagogy and national identity maintenance at the time. So, I dutifully slogged my way through early Margaret Atwood (The Edible Woman), Margaret Laurence (The Stone Angels), Robertson Davies (A Mixture of Frailties), and Mordecai Richler (The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz). After that, when I read literature, as opposed to popular fiction, it was more often than not either British, or translations of German and Russian works. My tastes over the past few years have shifted more towards the Middle East.
So, by way of engaging in a sort of reclamation of national literary identity, I am embarking on an adventure in CanLit. I am determined to read all three of these prize winning books in their entirety (something I found it difficult to do in the sixties) and publish reviews on this blog.
On a final note, as a Canadian writer of non-fiction (although I am working on my first novel), I was happy to get my check from Access Copyright. At the very least, it signals that someone out there is aware of what I have written.