Another day, another prize list. We are in the midst of what my father, the novelist Mordecai Richler, used to call the “seasonal follies” of the literary season and they do not abate. This week, you will know by now, the lists for the Governor-General’s Awards for literature were announced.

The Governor-General’s Awards hiked the amount of the cash that is awarded with their prizes a couple years ago, wanting some of the glamour the Scotiabank Giller Prize has attracted (without particularly understanding that its secret juries and its process of pre-selecting winners is much of what makes it less surprising and therefore interesting.) This augmenting of the booty, I think now, is possibly a mistake. To wit: I had an interesting e-mail from a literary agent friend of mine, someone short-listed authors in both categories in most years, who wrote, “now that the monetary value of winning has been increased 100-fold, and there is no literary reason for anything, the literary debates have dried up. Between one silliness and another, what is the point of discussion?”

My friend may be right. Here we are, a month into the season, and the lists are discussed as sports or celebrities are. These, of course, are the “follies” my father was referring to (a description of events that even Jack Rabinovitch, the founder of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, is fond of using.) What do we know about this year’s books shortlisted by the Giller, the GG and the Writer’s Trust? Who has profiled Annabel Lyon, a modest though admired success because of her short stories, and now short-listed for all three? Who has attempted to glean trends—a fiction in itself, perhaps, but nevertheless an interesting exercise—from this new spate of Canadian authors?

There is much good news in these lists.

Governor-General’s Fiction newcomer Deborah Willis, just twenty-seven, was previously a clerk at Munro’s Books in Victoria—a modest and dedicated apprenticeship. (See this good piece in the National Post about her and how it was owner Jim Munro who apparently brought Penguin Group Canada and his ex-wife Alice Munro’s attention to her writing.)

I’ll definitely be reading Annabel Lyon’s novel of Aristotelian Greece with particular relish, having studied the Classics at McGill, and Montrealers can take pride in Eric Siblin’s nomination, along with another one this season for the Writer’s Trust Prize for Non-Fiction, for his book, The Cello Suites, a wonderful enquiry into Bach’s mysterious composition that treats readers to a contemplation of the composer’s time, as well as of the master cellist Pablo Casals and his troubled day.

This is Siblin’s first book, and one that for a long time he was not even expecting to publish. I remember visiting Siblin in his flat in N.D.G. and the cello on the stand in the living room crowded with papers and piles of CD recordings—mostly of Bach, of course. He was clearly an author who, devoted to but fearful of his project (who was he to write about Bach, was the question you could see that he was carrying)—was not about to let go of his work easily. (You can hear an interview I recorded with Siblin, by the way, at the publisher Anansi’s link provided in this paragraph.)

Alistair MacLeod, too, was this way, his publisher Doug Gibson having to travel to Cape Breton literally having to wrest from his hands the ‘unfinished’ manuscript of the writer’s novel, No Great Mischief. Actually publishing a novel is often the writer’s least favourite part of a very long process.

But perhaps the French have it right, and the way to don accolades to authors and books—whether through the Academie française, by awarding the coveted title of “literary lion” (as the American Academy of Arts and Letters does) or through the penniless Prix Goncourt and Prix Femina—is the way to go. (We do, in fact, have at least one prize in Canada, the ReLit Award started by the Newfoundland writer Kenneth Harvey, but its criteria of small and independent houses are so arbitrary, and his own agenda so muddying, that it does not have anything near the impact of any of the French prizes.) With no fantasy of sudden wealth for the media or the public to discuss, all that remains are the books themselves—and discussing these, remember, was always meant to be the actual point of the contests, was it not?