Big news came to St. Albert-raised author Padma Viswanathan’s American home earlier this week when she received the good word about being on the shortlist for this year’s prestigious Giller Prize for her second book, The Ever After of Ashwin Rao.
She, like any respectable writer, was attentive to the timing of the announcement but, like any self-conscious writer, did not see it coming.
“I found out because of the Twitter banner coming up on my computer. I thought I had turned off that feature,” she admitted, adding that she was “anxious enough” about it that she made sure her husband was watching the live feed at the same time so she didn’t miss it. “He was the one to break the news to me.”
And then her agent and publisher called her from the floor at the Toronto event, held on Monday morning. They had prompted her to stay close to the phone. The hint didn’t mean she was expecting such good tidings.
“I think no writer could ever be so confident or arrogant as to presume on something like this. The way I see these juries is it’s not necessarily the case that the books that were not on the list are any objectively worse than the books that were on the list at a certain level of ambition or excellence, or whatever you want to call it,” she continued, adding that other major writing contests covering the same criteria have almost entirely different shortlists.
“There’s a lot of great books being written in Canada. All that happened is that what I wrote this jury happened to truly understand: they got it. It spoke to them. But that’s not to say that any of the other juries are any less perceptive. It’s simply that this is a very idiosyncratic enterprise by its nature.”
She was thrilled nonetheless and celebrated with a dinner out with relatives. A bottle of bubbly helped cap off the day.
“I had this American $100 bill that my aunt in Toronto had given me as a gift. I hadn’t been able to find the perfect thing to spend it on all this time. There was nothing that seemed absolutely appropriate. I used it this time to buy us a bottle of champagne.”
The Giller is easily Canada’s most prestigious and richest writing prize, with a 20-year history of celebrating the country’s most outstanding novelists. The winner will receive $100,000 while the other four finalists get consolation prizes of $10,000. That announcement is set to come on November 10. Viswanathan plans to be present for that event.
“It’s a huge gala in Toronto. In the lead-up to it, there are three events that they’re hoping all the finalists will do. The thing itself is a red carpet, live on TV event. I think it would be quite bad manners to skip that, nor would I want to.”
