Siblin scores at QWF after missing GG award
Last Updated: Wednesday, November 18, 2009 | 3:31 PM ET
The Canadian Press
The same day he was passed over for a Governor General's award, Eric Siblin won two Quebec Writers' Federation prizes for his non-fiction Bach book, The Cello Suites.
He won the McAuslan First Book Prize and the Mavis Gallant Prize for non-fiction, and the jury said The Cello Suites was "an almost pitch-perfect story of the making of one of the great pieces of music in Western civilization." Each QWF Literary Award is worth $2,000.
The awards, handed out at the Lion d'Or in Montreal on Tuesday night, honour the best in English-language literature published by Quebec writers in the past year.
In his book, Siblin intersects the life of Johann Sebastian Bach with the story of 20th century cellist Pablo Casals and his love of Bach's Cello Suites. Siblin's own quest to discover the music, and perhaps even the missing manuscript for the original composition, is woven into those narratives.
Siblin's book was also nominated for a Governor General's Literary Award, but the non-fiction prize went to Toronto novelist M.G. Vassanji for A Place Within: Rediscovering India.
Other QWF Literary Award winners:
- Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction: Colin McAdam, Fall.
- A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry: Carmine Starnino, This Way Out.
- Translation Prize, French to English: Lazer Lederhendler, Nikolski.
- Children's and Young Adult Literature: Monique Polak, What World Is Left.
Polak took her mother on stage to accept her award, saying she could not have told the story without her.
"It grew out of what happened to my mom during the Holocaust," Polak told CBC News after the ceremony. "It was a story I always tried to get out of her. She didn't tell it for more than 60 years."
What World is Left is about an affluent Jewish family in Amsterdam sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp during the Second World War. The whole family has to work, but the young protagonist is shocked when her father, a celebrated cartoonist, is forced to create propaganda materials for the Reich.
The story of her grandfather's efforts to keep the family alive are true, but Polak said she departed from her mother's story in recreating the young girl's emotions.
"My mother always said very strongly that she never questioned what her father had done to try to ensure the family's survival and that was to make propaganda drawings for the Nazis. In my book, the main character questions what her father has done and is in fact very angry with her father," she said.
Her mother never regretted making their story public, but her two brothers were shocked that she revealed what their father had done, she said.
"I had to make peace with it myself," Polak said. "I went to Theresienstadt where there is a museum and I saw my grandfather's propaganda art on display in this museum... I thought maybe I'd feel ashamed in some way and I didn't... I felt proud because my grandfather's talent kept the family alive."
With files from CBC's Jeanette Kelly
