Johanna Skibsrud has won this year's $5,000 Scotiabank Giller Prize, which honors the best Canadian novel or short story collection in English, for her novel, The Sentimentalists.
The book was published by Gaspereau Press, Kentville, Nova Scotia, in a first printing of only 800 copies, making it "undoubtedly the most obscure book ever to win a major literary award in Canada," as the Globe and Mail put it. Gaspereau publisher Andrew Steeves declined a larger publisher's offer to do a second printing for wider distribution, telling the paper, "If you are going to buy a copy of that book in Canada, it's damn well coming out of my shop."
The jury said that The Sentimentalists "charts the painful search by a dutiful daughter to learn--and more importantly, to learn to understand--the multi-layered truth which lies at the moral core of her dying father's life. Something happened to Napoleon Haskell during his tour of duty in Vietnam that changed his life and haunted the rest of his days. At the behest of his daughters, he moves from a trailer in North Dakota to a small lakeside town in Ontario where his family can only watch as his past slips away in a descending fog of senility. The writing here is trip-wire taut as the exploration of guilt, family and duty unfolds."
Skibsrud is a 30-year-old poet who lives in Nova Scotia and is the daughter of a Vietnam War veteran. At a ceremony in Toronto last night, she thanked her father, saying, "I can't imagine how proud he would have been."
Douglas Pepper, president of McClelland & Stewart, told the paper that the influence of the Giller Prize has increased "as independent bookstores disappear and readers lose a valuable source of advice in selecting new fiction." He told the Globe and Mail: "With fiction especially, people need guidance. They want to know when they plunk down their $30 whether or not they are going to like the book."
The book was published by Gaspereau Press, Kentville, Nova Scotia, in a first printing of only 800 copies, making it "undoubtedly the most obscure book ever to win a major literary award in Canada," as the Globe and Mail put it. Gaspereau publisher Andrew Steeves declined a larger publisher's offer to do a second printing for wider distribution, telling the paper, "If you are going to buy a copy of that book in Canada, it's damn well coming out of my shop."
The jury said that The Sentimentalists "charts the painful search by a dutiful daughter to learn--and more importantly, to learn to understand--the multi-layered truth which lies at the moral core of her dying father's life. Something happened to Napoleon Haskell during his tour of duty in Vietnam that changed his life and haunted the rest of his days. At the behest of his daughters, he moves from a trailer in North Dakota to a small lakeside town in Ontario where his family can only watch as his past slips away in a descending fog of senility. The writing here is trip-wire taut as the exploration of guilt, family and duty unfolds."
Skibsrud is a 30-year-old poet who lives in Nova Scotia and is the daughter of a Vietnam War veteran. At a ceremony in Toronto last night, she thanked her father, saying, "I can't imagine how proud he would have been."
Douglas Pepper, president of McClelland & Stewart, told the paper that the influence of the Giller Prize has increased "as independent bookstores disappear and readers lose a valuable source of advice in selecting new fiction." He told the Globe and Mail: "With fiction especially, people need guidance. They want to know when they plunk down their $30 whether or not they are going to like the book."