Through Black Spruce by Joseph Boyden has won the $50,000 (US$41,600) 2008 Scotiabank Giller Prize, Canada's major literary prize. The novel is Boyden's second.
The book is set in both northern Ontario and "the Ecstasy-fuelled modelling world of contemporary Manhattan," the Globe & Mail said. "The book has two alternating narrators--Will Bird, a Cree bush pilot (and the grandson of Xavier Bird, introduced in Three Day Road) who's in a coma in a hospital in Moose Factory after being pummelled by drug dealers, and Bird's niece, Annie, who until recently has been searching for her missing sister, Suzanne, a model in New York."
Boyden told the paper, "What I'm most excited by is being allowed to give voice to a segment of the first nations population that I'm so impassioned by and so in love with and so a part of." He said some of the prize money may go to creating "a fellowship for young students in Moose Factory and the Georgian Bay area, native students, to help them get into university."