Anuja Varghese wins Governor General’s literary award for fiction

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This article was published 08/11/2023 (1063 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

TORONTO – Anuja Varghese’s debut short story collection has won the Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction, an honour she’s calling a triumph for LGBTQ+ and racialized books during a time when literature from marginalized writers is being censored.

Varghese took home the $25,000 prize for “Chrysalis,” a collection that blends elements of Hindu folklore with modern diasporic life.

“It’s a huge win for short stories as a form, which don’t get the same love that sometimes novels do, and it’s really a win for racialized stories, queer stories and independent publishers,” the Hamilton-based writer said in an interview Wednesday.

“It was really born out of me not having those stories when I was younger myself.”

The book, published by House of Anansi Press, is also nominated for the Writers’ Trust’s Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers, a $10,000 prize to be announced Nov. 21.

Varghese, a mother of two with a day job securing grants for a local non-profit, said she assembled short stories for her first book because a full novel felt “really inaccessible.”

The stories blend genres through elements of horror, fantasy and fairy tales — the types of stories she loved growing up.

“But if I look back at those books and stories … they really are very much centred in white main characters,” she said.

She set tales of family, sexuality and cultural norms in familiar urban centres including Montreal, where she attended McGill University, and Toronto, where she lived for a decade.

One story, concerned with the history of a haunted farmhouse in southern Ontario inhabited by a South Asian family, plays on horror tropes without bringing attention to race or culture, she said.

“My hope for having this kind of recognition is that I’ll be able to turn open some doors for other emerging writers, particularly QTBIPOC writers,” she said, referring to queer, transgender, Black, Indigenous and people of colour.

“We’re in a time where diverse and queer books are being censored … so it’s a really important opportunity to celebrate the power of storytelling as a means of resistance.”

In the past year, anti-LGBTQ+ protesters south of the border have called for bans on certain books about sexual orientation and gender expression from school libraries, citing the need to protect children. The sentiment has trickled north, with calls to ban books with LGBTQ+ subject matter popping up in rural and religious communities in Manitoba.

The Governor General’s Awards, founded in 1936, are among the country’s oldest literary honours.

English and French awards are handed out in seven categories with the winners receiving $25,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, which administers the prizes.

This year’s non-fiction prize went to Toronto’s Kyo Maclear for “Unearthing: A Story of Tangled Love and Family Secrets,” a memoir published by Knopf Canada about the author’s discovery that the dad who raised her was not her biological father.

Winnipeg’s Hannah Green won the poetry award for her debut collection, “Xanax Cowboy,” published by House of Anansi Press.

Other winners include “William Shakespeareʼs As You Like It: A Radical Retelling” by Cliff Cardinal in the drama category. The Toronto-based Indigenous playwright and actor, born on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, was named for offering a subversive, updated take on the classic pastoral comedy.

Edmonton’s Sarah Everett took home the prize in young people’s literature, text, for “The Probability of Everything,” a middle grade novel about a science-loving 11-year-old grappling with the discovery of an asteroid set to collide with Earth. Vancouver’s Jack Wong was awarded in the young people’s illustrated books category for “When You Can Swim,” a collection of diverse vignettes of children learning to swim.

Peter McCambridge of Quebec City won the French-to-English translation prize for “Rosa’s Very Own Personal Revolution,” a translation of “La logeuse” by Montreal’s Éric Dupont.

— With files from Nicole Thompson

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 8, 2023.