Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize Doubles This Year! 8 Previous Winners To Read Now
There's big news in Canadian letters today: The purse for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize doubles this year, with $50,000 going to the winner and $5,000 going to each of the finalists. (Previously, the grand prize was $25,000, with runners up winning $2,500 each.) The award is in its 21st year (Chatelaine celebrated its 20th anniversary by polling past winners about their picks for must-read Canadian literature), and has honoured some of this country's best-known authors, including Miriam Toews, Emma Donoghue and Alice Munro. Below, we revisit eight spectacular titles that have taken the prize in the past.
This year's five nominees will be announced on Sept. 27, and the winner will be announced at the Writers’ Trust Awards ceremony in Toronto’s Glenn Gould Studio on Nov. 14.
Rogers Fiction 2017
The Origin Of Waves, by Austin Clarke, 1997
The inaugural winner by Barbadian-Canadian writer Clarke, who died in 2016 at age 81, tells the story of two friends who meet after 50 years on a snowy night in a Toronto bar and reflect on their idyllic childhoods in Barbados, their experiences as immigrants in Canada and the U.S., and the loves of their lives.
Afterimage, by Helen Humphreys, 2001
Poet Humphreys based Afterimage’s protagonist, Isabelle Dashell, on Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. Dashell, bereft after three stillborn births, hires a spirited Irish housemaid who becomes her model and a confidante to her husband, Eldon.
Runaway, by Alice Munro, 2004
Winner as well of the Giller Prize, this collection of eight short stories includes three about one character, Juliet, at different stages of her life and which formed the basis of the 2016 Pedro Almodovar film, Julieta.
The Book of Negroes, by Lawrence Hill, 2007
The celebrated novel by Hill follows the journey of Aminata Diallo, who is kidnapped in 1745, at age 11, from her hometown in Niger, and sold into slavery in South Carolina. Eventually, she is granted freedom and before embarking for Canada, she is tasked with recording the names of former slaves in “The Book of Negroes,” a real ledger kept by the British navy after the American Revolutionary War.
The Golden Mean, by Annabel Lyon, 2009
Lyon’s first novel (and the first ever to be nominated for all three of Canada’s top literary prizes for fiction — the Giller and the Governor General in addition to Rogers) brings to life the relationship between Aristotle and Alexander the Great, inhabiting the mind of the great thinker and his relentless pursuit of emotional balance.
Room, by Emma Donoghue, 2010
Also a finalist for the Booker and Governor General, Room is told from the perspective of five-year-old Jack, who grows up in captivity with his mother until they make their escape and Jack must adjust to life outside four walls. Donoghue also wrote the screenplay for the 2015 film of the same name, which was nominated for multiple Academy Awards, and won for Best Actress (Brie Larson).
All My Puny Sorrows, by Miriam Toews, 2014
Toews’s sixth novel — and second Rogers Prize–winner — recounts the close but turbulent relationship between two sisters who grew up in a conservative Mennonite community, and the struggle with depression of the elder and more accomplished of the two. Praised for mining the depths of sadness and also managing to be very funny at times, the story is based in part on Toews’s own family, and the suicides of her sister and father.
Mysterious Fragrance Of The Yellow Mountains, by Yasuko Thanh, 2016
Thanh’s debut novel is set in colonial Vietnam and based on the actual Hanoi Poison Plot of 1908, in which a group of Vietnamese nationalists tried to assassinate an entire garrison of the occupying French army.
GET CHATELAINE IN YOUR INBOX!
Subscribe to our newsletters for our very best stories, recipes, style and shopping tips, horoscopes and special offers.