It’s not hyperbole or patriotic chest-thumping to suggest Canada’s fiction writers punch above their weight in literary circles.
The Big Bang moment in Canadian fiction was, arguably, when a schoolteacher in an obscure village in Prince Edward Island sat down to write the words, “Mrs. Rachel Lynde lived just where the Avonlea main road dipped down into a little hollow…”
So began Anne of Green Gables, written in 1905 by Lucy Maud Montgomery. It was not the first Canadian novel, but its immediate, spectacular, global success — that is, after three years of rejections by publishers — was unprecedented in Canadian fiction.
More than a century later, Canadian fiction is read and celebrated around the world — so much so that it might be suggested that our nation of big vistas but comparatively modest population, punches above its weight on matters literary.
“Let us construct a national literature for Canada,” wrote Thomas D’Arcy McGee in 1857, as remembered recently in Canada’s History magazine, “neither British, nor French, nor Yankeeish, but the offspring and heir of the soil, borrowing lessons from all lands, but asserting its title throughout all!”
While McGee’s life was violently cut short, his call to writing and sharing the stories of our land lives on — even if Canadians aren’t wont to boast.
“Although the world seems to regard Canada as the U.S.’s slightly slow cousin, Canadians are quietly and deservedly smug about their rich and distinctive culture, which includes a distinguished literary canon,” Jean Hannah Edelstein wrote more recently in The Guardian newspaper. “Self-promotion is not a highly valued virtue in Canadian culture, but perhaps modesty should be suspended momentarily…”
Note, this was an American journalist writing in a British newspaper about Canadian fiction.
“I think,” says Sean Wilson, who, with his father Ian, founded the Ottawa International Writers Festival 28 years ago, “there’s something to be said for living in the shadow of a great neighbour — and I use great in the terms of large, not qualitative — that forces you to kind of fight for your place on the world stage.”
Canada’s propinquity to the United States has never been more acute than it is now, and, perhaps, never offered a greater opportunity for Canadian fiction to shine.
“Right now, we’re finally seeing how America wields its power and how much power it has,” Wilson says. “I think there is a great opportunity for us to celebrate more what is happening here, and I think there’s an appetite for it. I’m personally thrilled at any opportunity to bang the drum for the brilliant art coming out of Canada, and the brilliant perspectives that are being shared.”
There’s no doubt that Canadian culture has a prominent place on the global stage, in music (Drake, Céline Dion, Justin Bieber), television (Schitt’s Creek, Heartland, Handmaid’s Tale), and if not in Canadian film, then certainly with Canadians in film (Denis Villeneuve, James Cameron, Ryan Reynolds).
Fiction, meanwhile, offers its own vintage and contemporary Canadian stars, from the cosy mysteries of Louise Penny to the prophetic dystopias of Margaret Atwood; from the resilient working class of Gabrielle Roy’s The Tin Flute to the “McJobs” of Douglas Coupland’s era-defining Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. Canadian writers have at least one winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (a second hinging on whether to include Montreal-born Saul Bellow), multiple Booker Prize winners, and even a pair of Pulitzer Prizes for fiction (again, including Bellow).
“I really do think the strength is that there is no one background or one voice or one geography or one world view that dominates, I think it really is a kind of a microcosm of the best of everything that’s out there,” says Wilson, who estimates that his festival has featured 2,500 Canadian authors over almost three decades.
“What for me is exciting is that Canlit contains the entire world,” he says. “If there’s anything you’re interested in, if there’s any kind of writing you like, any kind of background that you’re interested in, any kind of story that you want to hear more of — from science fiction to thrillers to cutting edge of real science to memoir to whatever — you’re going to find it here, and it’s going to be world class. It’s remarkable. Given our population I think we do remarkably well. The imagination is a renewable resource.”
The country is a patchwork of perspectives. First came the Indigenous people, whose literature now gets the respect it was long denied, as seen in the contemporary successes of authors such as Waubgeshig Rice (Moon of the Crusted Snow) and Cherie Dimaline (The Marrow Thieves). Then came the English and French settlers, each building its own literary canon, perhaps most famously bridged by Hugh MacLennan’s Two Solitudes. Then came so many other immigrant groups and books that reflect the experience of their heritage, be it Esi Edugyan (Washington Black) or Rohinton Mistry (A Fine Balance).
“The amazing thing,” Wilson says, “is that there are people literally arriving here every day from all over the world, bringing with them histories and stories and traditions that are going to take root here in different ways, and that transforms all of our collective stories. To me, this is the key to everything, that it’s not a single perspective, it’s not a single background… There’s an ever-new influx of people coming and going from here back to all over, and that creates a kind of dynamic environment where nothing is static.”
Another foundation for Canadian fiction is public funding from all levels of government. While the support is never enough and should be increased, Wilson says, “We have maintained this idea that there is an inherent public good to telling our stories and to supporting storytellers.”
A shortlist of Canadian winners of major international fiction awards Nobel Prize for Literature
Nobel Prize for Literature
Saul Bellow (1976, Canadian-born American writer)
Alice Munro (2013)
Man Booker Prize
Margaret Atwood (2000, 2019 co-winner; six nominations) The Blind Assassin, The Testaments
Michael Ondaatje (1992, co-winner) The English Patient
Yann Martel (2002) Life of Pi
Eleanor Catton (2013, Canadianborn New Zealand author) The Luminaries
Multiple Booker Prize Nominations
Margaret Atwood (six)
Rohinton Mistry (three)
Esi Edugyan (two)
Michael Ondaatje (two)
Mordecai Richler (two)
Carol Shields (two)
Man Booker International Prize
Alice Munro (2009, when prize was still for “body of work”)
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Saul Bellow (1976, Canadian-born American citizen) Humboldt’s Gift
Carol Shields (1995, American-born Canadian citizen) The Stone Diaries
Prix Goncourt
Antonine Maillet (1979) Pélagie-la-Charrette, translated to English as Pélagie: The Return to Acadie
Prix Femina
Gabrielle Roy (1947) Bonheur d’occasion, translated