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The Nominees for the 2017 Governor General’s Literary Awards

Wednesday, October 4, 2017

Here is a thing of wonder to celebrate: the Canada Council for the Arts chose 70 books for their GG Books finalists, and will choose 14 winners, from an incredible 1,475 submissions. Can you imagine so many books? Can you imagine choosing? We wish we could read them all.

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. The finalists, announced today, include 5 books in each of these categories, for each language:

  • 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 producing them in e-text, DAISY 2, DAISY 3, and EPUB 3 with media overlay formats.

While we cannot produce all 70 longlisted titles for you (no matter how much we would like to do so) we invite NNELS account holders to request the ones they would like to read. For eligible NNELS users, the book request form is available on every page of catalogue search results. We also invite you to revisit the 2016 winners, which were wonderful, as were the books we produced for the 2015 awards.

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

See you back here on November 1st. Happy reading, everyone!