Tale Focused on Sexual Abuse in Catholic Church Wins Canada's Biggest Fiction Award
Toronto Star
November 11, 2009
http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/books/article/724111--linden-macintyre
-s-brave-novel-triumphs-at-giller-gala
Veteran CBC broadcast journalist Linden MacIntyre has claimed the 2009 Scotiabank Giller Prize for his second novel The Bishop's Man, a story that probes the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church.
MacIntyre, 66, who was raised in rural Nova Scotia and lives in Toronto, claimed the $50,000 award during Tuesday's announcement of Canada's most lucrative fiction prize at a Toronto gala.
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| Linden MacIntyre celebrates winning the Giller Prize for his novel 'The Bishop’s Man' in Toronto Nov. 10,2009. Photo by Keith Beaty |
"I had a speech planned, but it wasn't a speech I planned to give here," MacIntyre said as he accepted the award. "It was a speech I planned to give at home when I stood in front of the mirror."
Referring to the book's subject matter, MacIntyre thanked "a whole bunch of priests and nuns who are struggling to do their job in spite of their leadership."
MacIntyre emerged atop a field that included The Winter Vault by internationally renowned Anne Michaels, whose previous novel, Fugitive Pieces, also came up short in 1996.
Also in the running were Annabel Lyon, whose The Golden Mean still has a shot at this year's Governor General's and Writers' Trust fiction prizes, along with Kim Echlin's The Disappeared and Colin McAdam's Fall.
Another possible contender, Too Much Happiness, was withdrawn from competition by author Alice Munro in August.
In all, a jury panel of three writers – Alistair MacLeod of Canada, Victoria Glendinning of the U.K. and Russell Banks of the U.S. – read 96 titles, a dozen of which made this year's long list.
The jury citation described The Bishop's Man as a "brave novel, conceived and written with impressive delicacy and understanding."
"The landscape was very familiar," MacLeod, a native of Cape Breton, said after the award was announced. "I thought the issues of people living complicated lives in complicated times were universal."
The story pivots on protagonist Duncan MacAskill, a conflicted priest instructed by the local bishop in Cape Breton to help shield the church from a public scandal.
"The part of the story that I wanted to get at was not the dirty details of what these guys were doing and how twisted they were, but how the institution dealt with it. That is the huge crime," MacIntyre told the Star when the book was published in July.
MacIntyre, who started his journalism career in newspapers, began working for the CBC more than 30 years ago. A nine-time Gemini Award winner, he is best known for his investigative work for The Fifth Estate. His only previous novel, The Long Stretch, was published in 1999, and he is also the author of the memoir Causeway: A Passage from Innocence.
The Giller prize was founded in 1994 by Jack Rabinovitch, in honour of his late wife, Doris Giller, a former literary editor at the Star.
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