This year, Canadian literature belongs to the country’s female readers and writers for a few key reasons.

Our Literature Editor rounds up the winners of some of the principal Canadian prizes awarded this year. Enjoy this bounty of Canadian literature!

It’s that time of year again: autumn is upon us, with the tang of decay in the air and the scent of paper burning in the woodstove. And paper, bound into books and printed in interesting and artisanal fonts, is the order of the day for lovers of Canadian literature in autumn. Forthwith: the shortlisted [...]

Congratulations to Ken Babstock , who last evening won the 2012 Griffin Poetry Prize for a Canadian poet, for his fourth collection, Methodist Hatchet. Babstock was in the running with much-respected poets Jan Zwicky (for Forge, and whose Songs for Relinquishing the Earth won the 1999 Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry) and Phil Hall [...]

Leonard Cohen was recently awarded the Glenn Gould Prize, aka. “the Nobel Prize of the Arts.” Now, let us count the ways in which he is equal to the prize!

Congratulations to all the winners of the Governor General’s Literary Awards for 2011! In the English category, those recognized for their superb publications this year are: Fiction – Patrick deWitt, The Sisters Brothers (Anansi) Non-Fiction – Charles Foran, Mordecai: The Life and Times (Knopf) Poetry – Phil Hall, Killdeer (BookThug)

Congratulations to Esi Edugyan, winner of this year’s Scotiabank Giller Prize! Edugyan’s win was announced at last night’s Giller gala. Half-Blood Blues, set amidst the jazz scene in Europe before and after the Second World War, has been greatly praised since its release

Kudos to Patrick deWitt, whose second novel, The Sisters Brothers, has won 2011′s Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Nominated for numerous prizes this year, the book’s inventive characterization and genre-bending take on the Western are earning it acclaim from readers across Canada.

Hard on the heels of the other members of the “big three” English-language fiction triumvirate in Canada, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Literary Awards shortlists were announced today. In the English-language fiction category, the awaited shortlist reads:

Aaand they’re off! It’s the Rogers Writers’ Trust first out of the gate, with the Giller close behind and the Governor General’s Literary Awards coming up fast. Whatever you think of the growth of “prize culture,” in Canada autumn is the season of words on the page, Word on the Street, and the hope, speculation, [...]