More to Keep Us Warm by Jacob Scheier received the Governor General's poetry award, but the jury making the choice included two people with close connections to the work.

The founder of the Bookninja website is among those calling for a more open and accountable jury system for literary awards following controversy over the awarding of the Governor General's Literary Award for poetry this year.

Poet and occasional jury member George Murray says the Bookninja website has seen comments from throughout the arts community calling for more transparency in the jury process.

"Even the perception of conflict of interest can really devalue a prize, can really devalue the perception of what that prize is for," he told CBC's cultural affairs show Q on Monday.

The controversy centres around the awarding of the $25,000 prize for poetry to Jacob Scheier, a Toronto writer now living in Brooklyn, N.Y., for More to Keep Us Warm.

The Governor General's poetry panel had just three members, including Di Brandt, a longtime friend of Scheier who translated one of the poems in the book, and Pierre Giorgio Di Cicco, who wrote a blurb on the back cover of the book.

"The connections are out in the open. It's not shadowy backroom guessing on who might have known who or who slept with who — this is a pretty blatant lifelong connection between a juror and the winner," Murray said.

The controversy should not reflect on Scheier's work, but on how literary juries are created in Canada, Murray said.

"None of this is the winner's fault — Jacob Scheier didn't want this to happen to him," he said.

"The good thing about this coming to light is that it gives us an opportunity to examine the process and see what loopholes or ethical gaps can be filled."

The Canada Council issued a rebuttal in November saying it followed its guidelines throughout the process.

And Quill and Quire quotes Brandt saying the accusations of bias are "absurd," that the jury's decision was unanimous, and that all big prizes will have some element of controversy because the criticism is sometimes motivated by envy.

Murray agrees there's always "griping and envy," but said it's time for some reform.

"In the small … arts world in Canada, you can totally see how it would be difficult to find one set of jurors to judge one set of nominees and have no connections in between. The question becomes how deep are the connections and what form do they take," he said.

It also can be easy for a single jury member to dominate the process, he added.

Murray called on the Canada Council to review its ethical guidelines.

"Conflict of interest guidelines were really developed for the business and volunteer sectors where money is changing hands, and how we apply them to the subjective judgments of the arts world can be really difficult … but we're talking about public money here," he said.