Anuja Varghese wins Governor General’s literary award for fiction
By The Canadian Press on November 8, 2023.
TORONTO – Anuja Varghese has won the Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction for her debut short story collection. She took home the $25,000 prize for “Chrysalis,” a collection that blends elements of Hindu folklore with modern diasporic life. The book, published by House of Anansi Press, is also nominated for the Writers’ Trust’s Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers. 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 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. 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 Probability of Everything” by Sarah Everett in young people’s literature, text, and Jack Wong’s “When You Can Swim” in the young people’s illustrated books category. Peter McCambridge won the French-to-English translation prize for “Rosa’s Very Own Personal Revolution,” a translation of “La logeuse” by Éric Dupont. This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 8, 2023. 11-10
