Suzette Mayr sits inside a rail car in the Railway Car Shop at Heritage Park in Calgary on Dec. 8, 2022.Leah Hennel/The Globe and Mail
Suzette Mayr, Iain Reid and Susan Musgrave are among the well-known finalists for the Governor General’s Literary Awards.
The Canada Council for the Arts named 70 finalists across seven categories in both English and French on Wednesday. The 14 winners, who each receive $25,000, will be announced Nov. 8.
Mayr made the fiction list for The Sleeping Car Porter, which took home last year’s Scotiabank Giller Prize, while Reid is on the same short list for We Spread.
Also in the running for the English-language fiction prize are Janika Oza’s novel A History of Burning, Anuja Varghese’s short story collection Chrysalis and Kai Thomas’s novel In the Upper Country.
Musgrave, meanwhile, is a finalist for the poetry prize for Exculpatory Lilies, a collection that was also shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize.
Other finalists for that award are Baby Book by Amy Ching-Yan Lam, Old Gods by Conor Kerr, The Ridge by Robert Bringhurst and Xanax Cowboy by Hannah Green.
Non-fiction finalists include Gendered Islamophobia: My Journey With a Scar(f) by Monia Mazigh, Invisible Boy: A Memoir of Self-Discovery by Harrison Mooney, Message in a Bottle: Ocean Dispatches from a Seabird Biologist by Holly Hogan, Unbroken: My Fight for Survival, Hope, and Justice for Indigenous Women and Girls by Angela Sterritt and Unearthing: A Story of Tangled Love and Family Secrets by Kyo Maclear.
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.