Cree artist Kent Monkman at his exhibition Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience in Toronto on Jan. 18, 2017.Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press
Artistic collaborators Kent Monkman and Gisèle Gordon are among the finalists for the Governor General’s Literary Awards for fiction.
The Canada Council for the Arts named 70 finalists across seven categories in both English and French on Tuesday. The 14 winners, who each receive $25,000, will be announced Nov. 13.
Monkman and Gordon are in the running for their book The Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle: Vol. 1: A True and Exact Accounting of the History of Turtle Island, which presents the life story of Monkman’s time-travelling alter ego.
Also up for the fiction prize is the poet Canisia Lubrin for her work of interconnected short stories, Code Noir, and Jordan Abel for his novel Empty Spaces.
Rounding out the fiction finalists are the short story collection Her Body Among Animals by Paola Ferrante and Naniki, a novel by Oonya Kempadoo.
Non-fiction finalists include Niigan Sinclair for the essay collection Wînipêk: Visions of Canada from an Indigenous Centre, Danny Ramadan for Crooked Teeth: A Queer Syrian Refugee Memoir and Helen Knott for Becoming a Matriarch.
The Walls Have Eyes by Petra Molnar and The Age of Insecurity, Astra Taylor’s book accompanying last year’s CBC Massey Lectures, round out the finalists.
The poetry finalists include Bren Simmers for The Work, Barbara Tran for Precedented Parroting, Brandi Bird for The All + Flesh, Bradley Peters for Sonnets from a Cell and Chimwemwe Undi for Scientific Marvel.
The Governor General’s Literary Awards will also dole out honours for drama, writing and illustration in children’s literature, as well as French-to-English translation. There are separate French-language categories for francophone writing.