Reading List · Canadian fiction
The Governor General’s Literary Awards are Canada’s national book awards, administered by the Canada Council for the Arts. They were created by the Canadian Authors Association with Lord Tweedsmuir, then Governor General, and the first awards, for books of 1936, were presented in 1937. Today there are fourteen awards, seven each for books in English and French. Hugh MacLennan, Alice Munro, Michael Ondaatje and Guy Vanderhaeghe have each won the English-language fiction award three times.
By Lisanne Swart · 89 winners since 1936 · Canadian fiction · All literary prizes · Last reviewed 28 October 2026
Click a title to read about it further down ↓
The 2025 English-language fiction award went to Kyle Edwards’s Small Ceremonies, announced on 6 November 2025. The Canada Council scheduled the 2026 finalists announcement for 28 October 2026 and the winners for 12 November 2026; the 2026 winner is not yet known.
Quick answer
The Governor General’s Literary Award for English-language fiction is Canada’s national fiction prize, first given for books of 1936 and administered by the Canada Council for the Arts since 1959. The most recent winner is Small Ceremonies by Kyle Edwards (2025).
How this page chooses
The timeline at the top lists every winner for English-language Fiction, all 91 of them. The latest fifteen have their own entry further down, oldest first; the titles in the timeline that you can click are those.
Under each book is a line of plain fact about the book or its author, and nothing that cannot be checked.
Oldest first. The line in red is a fact about the book or its author, not an opinion about it.
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Eli and Charlie Sisters, two hired assassins, travel through Oregon and California in 1851 on a commission to kill a prospector they have been told is a thief, in a darkly comic western.
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize; filmed in 2018 with John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix.
A 2012 novel by Linda Spalding, a Kansas-born writer and editor who moved to Toronto in 1982 and works on the literary magazine Brick; it won ahead of finalists including Vincent Lam’s The Headmaster’s Wager.
Spalding is married to Michael Ondaatje, a three-time winner of the same award.
In 1866 the prospector Walter Moody arrives at Hokitika, a settlement on the West Coast of New Zealand’s South Island, and is drawn into a mystery surrounding a series of unsolved crimes.
Won the 2013 Booker Prize; Catton, at 28, was its youngest winner and the 832-page novel its longest.
Gabriel Quinn, a scientist of First Nations descent, returns to the Smoke River reserve in British Columbia, devastated by a defoliant he helped develop, while his company’s chief executive faces a crisis in Toronto.
King’s non-fiction book The Inconvenient Indian won the RBC Taylor Prize earlier in 2014.
A collection of short stories by Guy Vanderhaeghe, published by McClelland & Stewart in 2015, more than thirty years after his first collection, Man Descending, also won this award.
Made Vanderhaeghe a three-time winner, after Man Descending (1982) and The Englishman’s Boy (1996).
In Vancouver in 1991, Marie and her mother take in Ai-ming, a refugee from the crackdown after the Tiananmen Square protests, and the story traces their families through China from the late 1940s to 1989.
Also won the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
A 2017 novel by Joel Thomas Hynes, a writer, actor and filmmaker from Calvert, Newfoundland and Labrador, whose debut novel Down to the Dirt was filmed with Hynes in the lead role.
Also won the Winterset Award and was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize.
A 2018 novel by Sarah Henstra, whose previous book was Mad Miss Mimic; it won the English-language fiction award at that year’s Governor General’s Literary Awards.
Published in Canada by ECW Press, in hardcover and paperback, in 2018.
A 2019 novel by the Winnipeg writer and book reviewer Joan Thomas, published by HarperCollins; her fourth novel, after Reading by Lightning, Curiosity and The Opening Sky.
Thomas’s previous novel, The Opening Sky, had been shortlisted for the same award.
Five survivors of Canada’s residential school system try to rebuild their lives in Vancouver in the 1960s, in a debut novel partly drawn from the experiences of the author’s mother and grandmother.
Also won Canada Reads 2022; Prospero Pictures optioned it for a limited television series.
Six short stories about Inuk characters living in modern-day southern Canada, away from traditional Inuit homelands, ranging from unhoused to wealthy and young to elderly, with themes of displacement and loneliness.
Dunning’s earlier collection Annie Muktuk and Other Stories won the 2018 Danuta Gleed Literary Award.
Mira, studying to become an art critic, falls in love with Annie and grieves the death of her father, in a novel about art, love, death and time.
Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize and longlisted for the 2022 Giller Prize.
The debut short story collection of Hamilton, Ontario, writer Anuja Varghese, described in one review as a book in which horror and shame commingle with joy and transformation.
Also won the 2023 Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBT literature and the Hamilton Literary Award for Fiction.
The first novel by Jordan Abel, a Nisga’a poet and University of Alberta academic whose work addresses settler colonialism, often by reworking colonial texts; it was published by Penguin Random House in 2023.
Abel’s poetry collection Injun won the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2017; the novel was shortlisted for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award.
Tommy and Clinton, Indigenous best friends on a high-school hockey team in Winnipeg’s North End, face racism on and off the ice as their team, the Tigers, is forced out of its league.
Kyle Edwards’s debut novel; shortlisted for the 2026 Dublin Literary Award.
The Canadian Authors Association created the awards with Lord Tweedsmuir, the Governor General, and the first prizes, for books published in 1936, were presented in November 1937. Bertram Brooker’s Think of the Earth was the first fiction winner. Administration passed to the Canada Council in 1959, and the awards are now presented as part of its programme.
Until 1979 only the winners were announced. From 1979 the Canada Council published an advance shortlist, omitted only in 1981; it has varied between three and six names and has been five since 1997. There was no fiction award in 1965 or 1967, and in 1968 the prize was shared between Alice Munro’s Dance of the Happy Shades and Mordecai Richler’s Cocksure.
The programme gives fourteen awards each year, seven for English-language and seven for French-language books, in fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama, young people’s literature (text), young people’s literature (illustrated books) and translation. In 2025 the French-language fiction award (romans et nouvelles) went to Katia Belkhodja’s Les déterrées.
Each winning writer, translator or illustrator receives CA$25,000, each winning publisher CA$3,000 to promote the book, and each finalist CA$1,000, a total of CA$450,000 a year. Some writers have won in more than one category; Margaret Atwood, for example, has won for both fiction and poetry.
Canada’s national award for a book of English-language fiction by a Canadian writer, first given for books of 1936 and administered by the Canada Council for the Arts.
Kyle Edwards, for his debut novel Small Ceremonies, announced on 6 November 2025.
Not yet announced. The 2026 finalists were scheduled for 28 October 2026 and the winners for 12 November 2026.
Bertram Brooker, for Think of the Earth, as the best book of 1936.
Hugh MacLennan, Alice Munro, Michael Ondaatje and Guy Vanderhaeghe have each won the English-language fiction award three times.
CA$25,000 for each winner, plus CA$3,000 for the publisher; each finalist receives CA$1,000.
Yes. Each of the seven categories has an English-language and a French-language award, fourteen in total.
Yes. No English-language fiction award was presented for 1965 or 1967, and in 1968 the award was shared.
Winner list last verified 28 October 2026.
The notes on this page are all mine,
and the books are all theirs.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
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