Nino Ricci wins Governor General's Literary Award

Toronto writer Nino Ricci has won the Governor General's Literary Award for English fiction for his novel The Origin of Species.

Ricci was one of 14 winners of the $25,000 award announced Tuesday in Montreal.

It is the second win for Ricci, who earned the award in 1990 for Lives of the Saints, his debut novel.

"The young searching protagonist of Nino Ricci's The Origin of Species takes us into the now distant world of the post-Trudeau 1980s," the jury said in its citation. "Set mostly in Montreal, with an illuminating voyage to the Galapagos at its centre, this exquisite novel is both tough and tender and, in the end, confirms our belief in the resilience of the human heart."

"It's a thrill and it's certainly a boost for my morale," Ricci said Tuesday in an interview with CBC News.

Lives of the Saints was an auspicious debut and ensured the attention and generosity of critics and readers as Ricci wrote more difficult books, including Testament, a controversial take on the life of Jesus, he said.

Lives "was a more likeable book and it had broader appeal and some of my other books were not as likeable. They were darker in tone or more dangerous in content," Ricci said.

With The Origin of Species, Ricci is dealing with both the evolutionary view of the world, the subject of a floundering dissertation by the protagonist Alex Fratarcangeli, and the less clearly defined world of human relationships.

"I always wanted to explore that world view and how we can understand people differently if we look at them in more evolutionary terms. I know people are doing that through the sciences, but I haven't seen it done in fiction," Ricci said.

The storyline involving a relationship with a woman who has MS is based on a real woman Ricci once knew, whose vitality in the face of disease forced him to confront questions of how to live. The character Esther is an homage to her.

"That was taken from own experience and it was something I knew I would have to at some point deal with in my writing it's such a strong element in my own life," he said.

Ricci has three more novels on the go, including one young adult work, and just completed a 40,000-word exploration of Pierre Trudeau for the Extraordinary Lives series.

Ricci won over a field that included veteran writers Fred Stenson for The Great Karoo and David Adams Richards for The Lost Highway, as well as the debut novel Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen and Cockroach, the second book by Rawi Hage.

Montreal's Hage had been a favourite to win after being nominated for the Giller, the Writers Trust Award and the Governor General's Award, but ended up winning none of them. Earlier this year, he won the IMPAC prize for his first book, De Niro's Game.

Two Globe and Mail writers won Governor-General's Literary Awards on Tuesday Christie Blatchford of Toronto took the non-fiction award for Fifteen Days: Stories of Bravery, Friendship, Life and Death from Inside the New Canadian Army and John Ibbitson, now based in Washington, won the children's literature prize for The Landing.

Fifteen Days collects the stories of Canadian soldiers serving in Afghanistan, while The Landing is a coming-of-age story set in the Muskoka of the 1930s.

Ibbitson was surprised

Ibbitson said he was surprised to be nominated as a finalist, as he hasn't been able to promote the book his third young adult novel since being transferred to Washington.

He has a family connection to Muskoka his great-great-grandfather was one of the first settlers in the district and he grew up there himself.

"For those of us who grew up there, if you got land on the south side of the Severn River, you had a prosperous farm, if you got land on the north side of the river you got rocks," he told CBC News. "We got the north part of the Severn River."

Ibbitson says his motherlived in Muskokaduring the Depression and her own stories of the way things helped him recreate those hard times.

The young hero of The Landing, Ben, would rather play the violin than work on his uncle's hardscrabble farm and is seduced by the cultured family of cottagers who ask him to work for them.

"You have this kind of strange symbiosis, not always positive between the poor local folk, Irish and German settlers mostly living there year-round, and the very wealthy Americans and Canadians who come up to enjoy the lake. The book is very much about the tensions between the cottager class and the settler class," Ibbitson said.

Ibbitsonsaid he loved books about history when he was young and writing them now helps keep the magic of reading alive.

"When I started writing, I realized the time in my life when I loved reading the most, when reading was magic and full of discovery was when I was young It's just pure bliss to be young and discovering books."

Other winners:

• Poetry: Jacob Scheier of Toronto for More to Keep Us Warm.
• Drama: Catherine Banks of Halifax for Bone Cage.
• Children's illustration: Stphane Jorisch for The Owl and the Pussycat.
• Translation: Lazer Lederhendler of Montreal for his English translation of Nikolski by Nicolas Dickner.

It is the fourth award for Jorisch, one of Canada's most loved children's illustrators.

Quebec writer Marie-Claire Blaise also won the Governor-General's Literary Award for the fourth time, taking the French-language fiction prize for Naissance de Rebecca l're des tourments.

The jury called the book a "powerful song that overlays and complements the chaos of our time."

"Her keen observation of human beings shows that despite all evidence to the contrary, they still have the capacity for survival, modulation and the invention of a world that is learning to be," the jury said in its citation.

Other French winners were:

• Poetry: Michel Pleau of Quebec City, for La lenteur du monde.
• Drama: Jennifer Tremblay of Sorel, Que., for La liste.
• Non-fiction: Pierre Ouellet of Saint-Jean-sur Richelieu, Que., for Hors-temps potique de la posthistoire.
• Children's literature: Sylvie Desrosier of Longueuil, Que, for Les trois lieues.
• Children's illustration: Janice Nadeau of Montreal for Ma meilleure amis.
• Translation: Claire Chabalier of Notre-Dame-de-l'le-Perrot, Que., and Louise Chabalier of Macouche, Que., for Tracey en mille morceaux, a French translation of The Tracey Fragments by Maureen Medved.

The authors will be presented with the awards by Gov. Gen.Michalle Jean in a ceremony at Rideau Hall on Dec. 10.