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Governor General Literary Awards Finalists 2021

Thursday, October 14, 2021

The Governor General's Literary Award Finalists were announced early today, and we are so excited that we are able to offer a number of these titles in accessible formats in our collection.

The Governor General’s Literary Awards are given annually to the best English-language and the best French-language book in each of seven categories:

  • Fiction
  • Literary
  • Non-fiction
  • Poetry
  • Drama
  • Young People’s Literature (Text)
  • Young People’s Literature (Illustrated Books)
  • Translation (from French to English, and English to French)

The winners will be announced on November 1st and will each receive $25,000. Non-winning finalists will be awarded $1,000, and the publishers of winning titles will receive $3,000 for promotion.

Thanks to our partnerships with the Canada Council for the Arts, we will have the winners on NNELS for you to read in accessible formats. We will be making them available as audiobooks and as EPUB 3, and we can produce other digital formats upon reader request. If you have questions about how to use these books with the device or technology you have, please ask at your library or contact us.

More titles will be added to our collection over the coming month, so feel free to check back to see what has been included. While we cannot produce all 70 longlisted titles, we encourage you to request the ones you would like to read, in whatever format you need. To access our request form, log into your NNELS account and search for the book you want; if you cannot find it, look for the link to the title request form above the filters on any page of search results.

We also invite you to revisit nominees and winners from 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020!

Congratulations to all the longlisted authors, publishers, and editors, and thank you to the Canada Council for working with us once again.