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Two Globe and Mail writers were named winners of 2008 Governor-General's Literary Awards at an announcement ceremony in Montreal Tuesday, while Torontonian Nino Ricci won his second G-G for English-language fiction.

Columnist Christie Blatchford, 57, beat four other finalists in the English-language non-fiction category to earn $25,000 for her book Fifteen Days: Stories of Bravery, Friendship, Life and Death from Inside the New Canadian Army.

John Ibbitson, 53, the newspaper's Washington correspondent, also won $25,000 for The Landing, a novel, deemed by a three-member jury to be the best children's book (text) published in Canada this year.

It was Blatchford's first G-G nomination and victory while Ibbitson had been nominated previously in the children's category for his 1991 novel 1812: Jeremy's War.

Blatchford and Ibbitson were among a total of 14 G-G laureates named by the Canada Council for the Arts Tuesday at the McCord Museum of Canadian History. They will gather in Rideau Hall in Ottawa on Dec. 10 to receive their honours from Governor-General Michaëlle Jean.

The jury lauded Ibbitson's story, about a violinist growing up in Ontario's Muskoka region during the Great Depression, for being “as timeless as the music and the adolescent imagination that lie at its centre.” Blatchford's jurors said her writing “proves reportage and the language of common speech can rise to the challenge of literature.”

“I owe huge debts of thanks, chiefly to the men and women of the Canadian army, and to their families and friends, who trusted me with the telling of their stories,” Blatchford said in her acceptance speech. “Whatever is good about this book is good because of them.”

A total of 1,469 books – 906 in seven English-language categories, 563 in seven French – were submitted to juries this year, the 72nd instalment of the G-Gs.

Ricci's triumph, for his fifth novel, The Origin of Species, comes 18 years after his first novel, Lives of the Saints, took the G-G fiction prize. The jurors, including two previous G-G winners, Greg Hollingshead and Jane Urquhart, praised Ricci, 49, for the “great humanity, realism and wit” in The Origin of Species.

His win, with that of Blatchford, was a double-barrelled triumph for Doubleday Canada, which published both winners, and for Martha Kanya-Forstner, who edited both books. Doubleday had a total of six nominees out of a possible 10 in the G-G non-fiction and fiction categories, with Kanya-Forstner, the firm's editorial director, as the editor of record in each case.

Ricci's win dashed any hope that Montreal writer Rawi Hage and his second novel, Cockroach, would take at least one of the country's three most prestigious literary awards. Hage, 44, was the only fiction writer to be short-listed this year for the $50,000 Scotiabank Giller Prize, the $25,000 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Award and the $25,000 G-G – a repeat of the trifecta his premiere novel, De Niro's Game, enjoyed in 2006. And again, with Tuesday's news, he failed to go gold on all three occasions.

The other G-G fiction nominees this year were Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen, David Adams Richards's The Lost Highway and The Great Karoo by Fred Stenson.

The 56 non-winning finalists in each category receive $1,000 each.

Besides Ricci, four other of yesterday's recipients had previously won G-Gs. Most prominent among them were two Montrealers: Marie-Claire Blais, who, at 69, received her fourth G-G, in the $25,000 French-language fiction category, for her novel Naissance de Rebecca à l'ère des tourments [The Birth of Rebecca in the Era of Torments], and Stéphane Jorisch, another four-time laureate with his win as the illustrator of a new edition of the Edward Lear classic The Owl and the Pussycat.

The other winners: Non-fiction (French): Hors-temps: poétique de la posthistoire [Out of Time: Poetics of Posthistory] by Pierre Ouellet (Saint Jean-sur-Richelieu, Que.) Poetry: More to Keep Us Warm by Jacob Scheier (Toronto); La lenteur du monde [The Heaviness of the World], Michel Pleau (Quebec City) Drama: Bone Cage by Catherine Banks (Halifax); La liste [The List ], Jennifer Tremblay (Sorel, Que.) Children's literature (French text): Les trois lieues [The Three Leagues] by Sylvie Desrosiers (Longueuil, Que.) Children's literature (illustration, French): Ma meilleure amie [My Best Friend] by Janice Nadeau (Montreal) Translation: Lazar Lederhendler for his French-to-English translation of Nikolski by Nicolas Dickner; Claire Chabalier and Louise Chabalier for their English-to-French translation of Maureen Medved's The Tracey Fragments [Tracey en mille morceaux].