BY ERIC VOLMERS || CALGARY HERALD || DECEMBER 2011

“If you’ve got a new Michael Ondaatje and Margaret Atwood, you’re off to a good start,” says Simone Lee, co-owner of Calgary independent bookstore Pages on Kensington.

It’s perhaps not that surprising that book sellers and other literati have a tendency to focus on our own literature when asked what stands out in 2011.

The king and queen of CanLit offered two very different books this year, leading the way for an embarrassment of riches for our national literature. In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, found the 72-year-old Atwood studying her own prickly relationship with a genre she’s always claimed she doesn’t write. Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table was a coming-of-age tale about a boy crossing the Indian Ocean.

This was only the tip of the iceberg for CanLit, with homegrown authors showing their stuff on an international stage. Patrick deWitt and Esi Edugyan both had rare literary hat tricks with shortlist nods for the big three Canuck prizes for Sisters Brothers and Half-Blood Blues respectively.

Edugyan won the Giller, deWitt the Governor General’s. But they also found themselves shortlisted for the prestigious Man Booker Award. Both were Canadian books, neither took place in Canada.

“I really like seeing this trend toward books that aren’t just about the hardships of life on the Canadian frontier,” says Anne Logan, artistic associate for Calgary’s WordFest. “We’re moving into different topics and different parts of the world. It’s been questioned whether Canadian literature is as Canadian as it used to be. I totally disagree with that. I think we’re exploring new topics and I think it’s great for us.” >>READ MORE

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