Canada’s most prestigious and richest fiction prize, the $50,000 Scotiabank Giller Prize, was awarded last night to the debut novel The Sentimentalists by Johanna Skibsrud, published by Gaspereau Press. Skibsrud drew on her father’s experiences in the Vietnam War to write the novel; he witnessed the murder of a civilian woman, reported it, testified in a trial of the case and was ostracized within the military for his actions.
Winning the prize puts Skibsrud, 30, in the company of past winners including the biggest names in Canadian literature such as Margaret Atwood, Mordecai Richler, Alice Munro and Michael Ondaatje. One other debut novel has won the award, Vincent Lam’s Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures in 2006.
The prize’s 17-year history has been dominated by winners from the major publishing houses. This year’s shortlist had a higher number than usual of books from smaller houses. Gaspereau Press is the smallest house to have produced a prize winner.
Gaspereau is, in fact, so small and its production so dedicated to artisanal quality that The Sentimentalists will likely not be available in sufficient numbers to immediately satisfy the big bump in demand that a Giller win creates. Last year’s winner, The Bishop’s Man by Linden MacIntyre, published by Random House Canada, was the fastest selling Giller winner, selling 75,000 copies in hardcover.
Gaspereau hand prints The Sentimentalists covers on a Vandercook hand press. While keeping up with the company’s other business, they have an approximate maximum capacity of about 1,000 books a week. “We will print books as long as we have sales, and as quick as we can, and that’s about all we can do,” said co-publisher and co-owner Gary Dunfield. “I know that has caused a lot of discussion, but a year from now, this will have gone away and we will keep making nice books and the readers will keep expecting nice books from us. That’s what we do.” Gaspereau has concentrated on filling orders from independent bookstores first.
An e-book version is available for download from Kobo now. At present, there is no U.S. publisher.
Gaspereau has so far turned down offers from larger publishers to help print and distribute the book, and Skibsrud, who has previously published two books of poetry with the press, is leaving the decision up to the publisher.
Skibsrud’s agent, Tracy Bohan of the Wylie Agency, has sold U.K. and Commonwealth rights (excluding Canada) for The Sentimentalists to Heinemann, an imprint of Random house U.K, which had plans to release the book for spring 2011.
