Nominees for biggest book award in Canada are in Halifax Wednesday night
A slate of some of Canada’s best writers are appearing in Halifax and you have a chance to hear them talk about their books Wednesday night, including one Atlantic Canadian.
The five finalists for the Giller Prize, arguably the largest book award in Canada, are in Halifax as they tour the country before the award-winner is revealed.
Nicholas Herring of P.E.I. was nominated for his second novel, Your Breath in Charcoal.
“Where does one begin? I don’t know. It’s pretty crazy. Yeah, it’s crazy,” he says.
“It’s very confusing and very exciting. It doesn’t even really feel real to me, honestly.”
The award gives $100,000 to the winner and $10,000 to each finalist.
The other four nominees this year are:
- Tara Gereaux for Wild People Quiet
- Michelle Good for Eliza Sunshine
- Nazanine Hozar for The Small Ones
- Patmeena Sabit for Good People
You can catch Herring and the other nominees at the Halifax Central Library from 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m.
An epic for Maritimers
Herring says he wanted to write an epic for Maritimers, a journey story like Homer’s Odyssey. He has spent time in the trades, tying rebar, fishing, and he wanted to bring that experience forward with working-class, East Coast characters.
“I don’t see anybody writing about this stuff and I know this stuff pretty well. So I may as well try.”
He says it is kind of “bewildering” that he wrote a book about Islanders tying rebar in the late 90’s and he’s up for the Giller Prize.
“It’s kind of a mad thing. Like, all these other books, they deal with war and [other things], And then I said, man, I got a book about two idiots just trying to figure their lives out. It’s crazy.”
Early on there are some easy tells that the story begins in Saint John, N.B., when the narrator mentions listening to Country 94.1, one of Acadia Broadcasting’s own radio stations. O’Leary’s pub is another local staple found in the pages.
Long journey
“It’s been a long and winding journey” to get here, Herring says.
He studied creative writing at St. Jerome’s University and wrote some short stories for a collection, but thankfully, as he says, he did not publish any of them because they were not very good.
But when it came to writing novels, he had to fail a few times before he figured out how to do it.
He went into a creative writing master’s program at the University of Toronto, which he says is pretty prestigious, accepting only a few people a year.
His thesis at the end of that program was a novel that took a year to write but which he felt was not good.
After all that work, it was soul-crushing, he says.
He felt similar for a few years, having written some short stories and a pair of novellas that went unpublished.
It took until about 2019, while he was walking along a beach with his wife, when he told her he wanted to try it again, writing a novel.
Just a year later he had Some Hellish.
That first book earned the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and was published through Goose Lane, the same publisher as his Giller-Prize-nominated second book.
A version of Herring from when he started the journey may have felt he wanted to be a master of his craft and “see how good you could make yourself become.”
“I’m not saying I’ve become an astronaut and I’m far, far away from that, but to receive this kind of recognition for my second book is… Yeah, it’s everything.”
Turning point
Herring says he feels like he has been caught up in something, now that he has been nominated for the award.
Doing all these interviews feels validating and humbling, he says, but now he needs to find a way to launch into writing full-time. That is the dream.
“I’m sick of working for other people and I’m not going to get any younger,” says Herring.
“There are writers in this country who write full-time. And that I made the shortlist for the biggest literary award in the country should be, to me, an indication that I’m like, I’m on the right track at the very least, right?”
