Author Annabel Lyon of New Westminster, B.C., has nominations for the Governor General's Award, the Giller Prize and the Writers' Trust award for her debut novel The Golden Mean. (Random House Canada/Canadian Press)Ontario writer Alice Munro's Too Much Happiness and Newfoundland writer Michael Crummey's Galore are among the fiction nominees for this year's Governor General's Literary Awards.

Munro recently asked to be left out of contention for the Giller Prize, one of Canada's top literary awards, saying she wanted to give other writers a chance to shine.

Juries have found it difficult, however, to overlook her most recent short-story collection and she was nominated for the Writers' Trust awards as well as the Governor General's Awards, whose nominees were announced Wednesday in Toronto.

Annabel Lyon, a New Westminster, B.C., writer, is also in contention for the fiction award for her book The Golden Mean.

She scored a hat trick with her debut novel — with nominations for the Writers' Trust Award, the Giller and the Governor General's Award for fiction.

Lyon said she is "in shock" over the amount of recognition she has received with The Golden Mean, a fictional exploration of the philosopher Aristotle's life in the period when he is teaching a young Alexander the Great.

"I don't even feel entirely happy yet. I can't believe it," she told CBC News.

It took Lyon eight years to write The Golden Mean, in part because she teaches and had two children and produced two other books — one of short stories, one a children's novel — in the same period.

'So resonant and so relevant'

She said Aristotle had fascinated her since she was a philosophy undergraduate student at Simon Fraser University.

"Even after I left philosophy behind and went on to other things, I went back to read him because … the works remain so resonant and so relevant even though they were written 2,300 years ago," she said.

"The things he was writing about — what does it mean to be a good person and what is extremism and things like that — are so contemporary," she said.

The catalyst for her as a writer, however, was the 9/11 attacks, which prompted her to consider the meaning of her own work.

"I went back to Aristotle's Ethics and started reading that, and one day I just looked at the biography on the front flap and it's the size of a postage stamp. Not much is known about him," she said.

As a fiction writer, she decided to take on the task of recreating the life of this towering figure. Lyon is also considering a sequel, possibly centring on Aristotle's daughter, who would have had a very different kind of life from the great thinker.

The other fiction nominees are Kate Pullinger, a Cranbrook, B.C., native now living in London, England, for The Mistress of Nothing and Deborah Willis of Victoria, for Vanishing and Other Stories.

Eric S. Margolis of Toronto is nominated for American Raj: Liberation or Domination? (Key Porter Books)Willis is a new writer who has received little other attention for her collection of short stories, most of which centre on how loss resonates among families and lovers left behind.

Willis, who is currently reading Munro's Too Much Happiness, told CBC News she has looked up to Munro for a long time and is "amazed" at being nominated with her.

The Calgary-born writer said she loves the short-story format.

"I love reading them," she said. "Writers take so much time with short stories and, because they don't have much space, they accomplish a lot in a short space — and sometimes that can really create beautiful, intense writing."

Willis, who studied at the University of Victoria, works for a bookstore in Victoria and is working on a new set of linked short stories.

"I like writing them. I like that you can talk about one subject and use one voice for a little while and then change characters. You can try out different things."

Acclaimed fiction writer M.G. Vassanji, who has twice won the Giller Prize, is nominated in the non-fiction category for A Place Within: Rediscovering India, a memoir of his travels to the homeland of his grandparents, a place he had never before visited.

Also on the non-fiction list are Westmount, Que., writer Eric Siblin's The Cello Suites: J.S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece and Regina writer Trevor Herriot's Grass, Sky, Song: Promise and Peril in the World of Grassland Birds, both of which also have Writers' Trust nominations.

Other non-fiction nominees:

• Randall Hansen of Toronto for Fire and Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany, 1942-45.
• Eric S. Margolis of Toronto for American Raj: Liberation or Domination? (Resolving the Conflict Between the West and the Muslim World).

In drama, Toronto playwright Beverly Cooper's work about Steven Truscott, whose 1959 conviction for murder was declared a miscarriage of justice in 2007, is competing against Vancouver playwright Kevin Loring's play about the fallout from the residential school system.

The drama nominees are:

• Beverley Cooper of Toronto for Innocence Lost: A Play about Steven Truscott.
• Kevin Loring of Vancouver for Where the Blood Mixes.
• Joan MacLeod of Victoria for Another Home Invasion.
• Hannah Moscovitch of Toronto for East of Berlin.
• Michael Nathanson of Winnipeg for Talk.

In the poetry category, the nominees are:

• David W. McFadden of Toronto for Be Calm, Honey.
• Philip Kevin Paul of Brentwood Bay, B.C., for Little Hunger.
• Sina Queyras of Montreal for Expressway.
• Carmine Starnino of Montreal for This Way Out.
• David Zieroth of North Vancouver for The Fly in Autumn.

Tim Wynne-Jones of Perth, Ont., is nominated for a third Governor General's Award for his suspense novel The Uninvited. (Candlewick Press/Random House of Canada)Tim Wynne-Jones, who won a Governor General's Award in 1993 for his children's short stories collection One of the Kinder Planets and in 1995 for The Maestro, is nominated again.

Wynne-Jones, known for his Rex Zero series, is nominated for The Uninvited, a suspense novel for young adults about a stalker who menaces a home in rural Ontario.

He said he was inspired by the discovery of a little house in a rural spot near his Perth, Ont., home. It was next to a "snye," a regional word for a little stream that bypasses a waterfall, and seemed the perfect stage for a spooky drama to play out.

"It is a great place to get away to, but also a place where you could watch somebody," Wynne-Jones said.

As a writer, Wynne-Jones says he writes to the age of the characters in the book — in this case 19 and 22 — and believes that young readers will stick with the book if they're ready for it.

After two previous wins, he said he's still excited to be nominated.

"Every writer is unsure of a book and it's a validation of it — [knowing] other people like it too," he said.

Also nominated for children's literature are:

• Shelley Hrdlitschka of North Vancouver for Sister Wife.
• Sharon Jennings of Toronto for Home Free.
• Caroline Pignat of Ottawa for Greener Grass: The Famine Years.
• Robin Stevenson of Victoria for A Thousand Shades of Blue.

In the illustration category for children's literature the nominees are:

• Rachel Berman of Victoria for Bradley McGogg, the Very Fine Frog, with text by Tim Beiser.
• Irene Luxbacher of Toronto for The Imaginary Garden, with text by Andrew Larsen.
• Jirina Marton of Colborne, Ont., for Bella's Tree, with text by Janet Russell.
• Luc Melanson of Laval, Que., for My Great Big Mamma, with text by Olivier Ka.
• Ningeokuluk Teevee of Cape Dorset, Nunavut, for Alego, with text by Ningeokuluk Teevee, translation by Nina Manning-Toonoo.

In the category of translation from French to English, the nominees are:

• Phyllis Aronoff and Howard Scott of Montreal for A Slight Case of Fatigue, an English translation of Un peu de fatigue by Stéphane Bourguignon.
• Jo-Anne Elder of Fredericton for One, an English translation of Seul on est by Serge Patrice Thibodeau.
• David Homel and Fred A. Reed of Montreal for Wildlives, an English translation of Champagne by Monique Proulx.
• Susan Ouriou of Calgary for Pieces of Me, an English translation of La liberté? Connais pas by Charlotte Gingras.
• Fred A. Reed of Montreal for Empire of Desire: The Abolition of Time, an English translation of Le temps aboli : l'Occident et ses grands recits by Thierry Hentsch.

The winners of the $25,000 awards will be announced Nov. 17 in Montreal.