The Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, which will be awarded at a ceremony in Toronto on Wednesday, is celebrating its 20th anniversary. During the past two decades it has served as a sort of counterweight to the splashier, higher-profile Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the venerable Governor-General's Literary Awards, which were established 80 years ago. It's short lists tend to be more eclectic, often more surprising, than its fellow awards; at the same time, the prize has recognized some contemporary classics (Lawrence Hill's The Book of Negroes; Emma Donoghue's Room; Joseph Boyden's Three Day Road) that were ignored by the other prizes.
In advance of the ceremony, we asked this year's finalists – Katherena Vermette (The Break), Michael Helm (After James), Anosh Irani (The Parcel), Kerry Lee Powell (Willem de Kooning's Paintbrush) and Yasuko Thanh (Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains) – to tell us about their favourite past winner of (or, in two cases, finalist for) the prize.
Michael Helm
Looking at the list of finalists over the years, I find many writers – some well known, some less so – whose books have impressed me, and many others I haven't read but want to. Of the finalists I've read, I'm on side with Mordecai Richler's Barney's Version, all the Alice Munros, and Barbara Gowdy's The Romantic. Of the winners, I'll put a plug in for Patrick deWitt's The Sisters Brothers. It's perfectly itself and nothing but, a strange comedy that's compelling partly for inviting sentiment while staving off sentimentality. DeWitt's talent is tall, dark and weird.
Anosh Irani
When I first came to Canada in the late nineties, flipping television channels not to think of the cold and rain, I came across a writer being interviewed.
Although I don't recall if he was smoking a cigarette or a cigar, he spoke with such humour and eloquence that I thought to myself, "Here's a writer." It was later that I discovered who he was. And although Mordecai Richler never won the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize – Barney's Version was a finalist – I have to write about him.
The Mexican writer Carmen Boullosa describes literature as "that inexplicably beautiful bomb that goes off and as it destroys, rebuilds." What does it destroy? Our beliefs, our assumptions. It shatters them. It questions what we know and exposes us to what we don't, and in doing so, it disturbs us. That's what Richler does – he presents the raw open wounds of human beings with honesty, passion and irreverence; he makes us lose our balance. We are terribly moved, but always imbalanced. And that is his gift.
Kerry Lee Powell
The stories in Siege 13 by Tamas Dobozy alternate between the present-day Hungarian diaspora and the war-torn Budapest of the past. Dobozy returns to the titular siege throughout the collection, recounting the ways in which it drags "its wreckage into the next half-century." The collection is a powerful exploration of how traumatic memories continue to shape the present. And Dobozy is a wonderful writer, handling the trauma of war with a cadenced plain-spokenness that is elegant, ideally suited to the subject and very difficult to master. A sense of absurdity and a latent fabulism add extra layers of meaning, and remind me of Eastern European writers such as Kafka, Heinrich Boll and Milan Kundera.
Yasuko Thanh
In 1999, Elyse Gasco was a finalist for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. Although her short story collection Can You Wave Bye-Bye, Baby? didn't win, this dark, witty book is my pick because it marked me in ways that are still with me today. These stories, exploring love, loss and the machinations of domesticity, remind me of the power that the story can wield. Over the years I've returned to this exemplary collection that provides darkness in light, and light in darkness. The black humour in this book, like a night sky, makes its light shine brighter. The way the stars shine brighter, the darker the night. This book reminds me of what it is to be human: flawed, broken and, for all that, still reaching for who we are and were meant to be.
Katherena Vermette
Miriam Toews won the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize for her fourth and sixth novels, but I have been a fan since her very first book. When I read Summer of My Amazing Luck I was living in the neighbourhood where the book is based – West Broadway in Winnipeg. I knew the streets, the housing complexes (was living in one), and the hard boringness of young parenthood (was living in that, too). The book had all the excitement of a good gossip and the emotional catharsis of a good cry. I was hooked. I have read almost everything she's put out since, and both those things are true in every one. They are great reads, and they are also very brave. To be able to grasp all that complexity and the depth of every character is a hard thing to do. To make us feel something for those we didn't think we could care about, to relate to those we thought we had nothing in common, is the magic of Toews.