Annal:1994 Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Governor General's Literary Award in the year 1994. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 1994 Governor General's winner
- Score: 10.44
A Discovery of Strangers tells of the meeting of two civilizations—the first encounter of the nomadic Dene people with Europeans—in an imaginative reconstruction of John Franklin’s first map-making expedition in 1819—21 in what is now the Northwest Territories. At the heart of the novel is a love story between twenty-two-year-old midshipman Robert Hood, the Franklin expedition’s artist, and a fifteen-year-old Yellowknife girl known to the British as Greenstockings. A national bestseller, published also in Germany and China, Wiebe’s first novel in eleven years and his twelfth work of fiction won him his second Governor General’s Award for Fiction at the age of sixty, over strong competition from Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro.
- 1994 Governor General's finalists
- Score: 6.44
Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride is inspired by “The Robber Bridegroom,” a wonderfully grisly tale from the Brothers Grimm in which an evil groom lures three maidens into his lair and devours them, one by one. But in her version, Atwood brilliantly recasts the monster as Zenia, a villainess of demonic proportions, and sets her loose in the lives of three friends, Tony, Charis, and Roz. All three "have lost men, spirit, money, and time to their old college acquaintance, Zenia. At various times, and in various emotional disguises, Zenia has insinuated her way into their lives and practically demolished them.
Open Secrets: Stories
- 1995 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- 1994 Governor General's finalists
- Score: 12.45
In these eight tales, Munro evokes the devastating power of old love suddenly recollected. She tells of vanished schoolgirls and indentured frontier brides and an eccentric recluse who, in the course of one surpassingly odd dinner party, inadvertently lands herself a wealthy suitor from exotic Australia. And Munro shows us how one woman’s romantic tale of capture and escape in the high Balkans may end up inspiring another woman who is fleeing a husband and lover in present-day Canada.
“Open Secrets is a book that dazzles with its faith in language and…
How Insensitive: A novel
- 1994 Governor General's finalists
- Score: 6.44
Adrift in Toronto’s gossipy, grant-driven cultural scene, a coterie of overeducated, underemployed young people stab at vaguely artistic projects and scramble after the opportunities that seem tantalizingly within reach—if you know the right people. Searching for work, sex and big-city life is Ted Owen, who quickly finds himself swept into the complicated lives of the young and the jaded, people who thrive in a strange world of hip fashion and surreal night-clubs.
- 1994 Governor General's finalists
- Score: 6.44
Honest and poignant, Division of Surgery is an essential novel tracing one woman’s journey through and beyond her experience of inflammatory Bowel Disease—a disease chronically painful and potentially fatal. This carefully written narrative confronts harsh pain with biting wit and carries the reader to a quiet, life-affirming respect for the protagonist.
