The most prestigious literary prize in Canada is the Governor-General’s Literary Award, established in 1937. Anyone interested in sampling outstanding Canadian fiction or in seeing where Canadian fiction has been and where it’s headed would do well to use these winning novels as a guide to good reading:

Whatever the setting—the prairies of Saskatchewan (Elizabeth Hay’s A Student of Weather), the Toronto of Margaret Atwood (The Robber Bride), the Montreal of Mordecai Richler (The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz), or the small towns of Ontario as seen in the stories of Alice Munro (Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories or The Moons of Jupiter), or the Vancouver Chinatown of Sky Lee’s Disappearing Moon Café and Wayson Choy’s The Jade Peony—all have a distinctly evoked sense of place that I think distinguishes Canadian fiction.

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Here are my favorite Canadian writers, and the books I’ve most enjoyed by them: Marianne Ackerman’s Jump; David Bergen’s A Year of Lesser; Bonnie Burnard’s A Good House; Robertson Davies’s Fifth Business and What’s Bred in the Bone (and others); Sara Jeanette Duncan’s The Pool in the Desert; Timothy Findley’s Headhunter; Barbara Gowdy’s Mister Sandman and The Romantic; Wayne Johnston’s The Colony of Unrequited Dreams; Farley Mowat’s The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be; Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost; Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach; Diane Schoemperlen’s In the Language of Love; Jane Urquhart’s The Underpainter; Guy Vanderhaeghe’s The Englishman’s Boy; and Carol Shields, who brings the city of Winnipeg to life in novels like Larry’s Party and The Republic of Love.

There is one writer who, while not Canadian in fact, seems to be so in the spirit of his books: Howard Norman, author of three novels that take place in Newfoundland, the best being The Bird Artist.