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Peterborough, Ont. writer Charles Foran has won the 75th Governor General’s Literary Award in the English-language non-fiction category for his biography of Montreal author Mordecai Richler, Mordecai: The Life & Times, it was announced Tuesday in Toronto. Joining Foran among the winners was Patrick deWitt, in the English-language fiction category, for his much-acclaimed novel The Sisters Brothers. DeWitt, originally from Vancouver Island, now lives in Oregon. Montrealer Donald Winkler won the award for French to English translation for Partita for Glenn Gould (translated from Partita pour Glenn Gould, by Georges Leroux). This is his second Governor General’s award for translation; he won the prize in 1994.sacs louis vuitton Winkler is also nominated for a Quebec Writers’ Federation translation prize, for the same book. The winner of that prize will be announced Nov. 22. Leroux himself won a Governor General’s award as well Tuesday, for French-language non-fiction, for his book Wanderer : essai sur le Voyage d’hiver de Franz Schubert. Each GG prize winner receives $25,000. DeWitt’s novel The Sisters Brothers also won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Award earlier this year, and was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and Britain’s prestigious Man Booker Prize. “When this book came out, I had never really thought of myself as someone who would win a prize,” he said moments after the announcement. “So to be embraced in this way – it just makes me feel good about books.” The Sisters Brothers tells the story of Eli and Charlie Sisters, guns-for-hire who are tracking a prospector through mid-19th-century California. “I think that I’m still processing a lot of it,” deWitt said of his success these past few months. “I think it will settle in over the next few months. I think it’s something I’ll be thinking of more, once all the noise has passed and I’m back in my office. All I know now is I feel predominantly a feeling of gratitude. Recognition on this level was completely unexpected. So it was just sort of the nicest of surprises for me. I feel very moved by it all.” The prize was especially meaningful to deWitt, because he received a much-needed grant from the Canada Council for Arts, which administers the GGs, during the writing of The Sisters Brothers. He was running out of money and considering asking his father for a construction job when the envelope arrived in the mail.
