New Saskatchewan Literary Award

Link http://www.skwriter.com/
We have had an exciting development tin the literary world of Saskatchewan. On May 3 the Saskatchewan Writers Guild and Cheryl and Henry Kloppenburg announced the launching of the Cheryl and Henry Kloppenburg Award for Literary Excellence. This new literary award will recognize Saskatchewan writers who have written a substantial body of literary work. The award will be made annually and is for the sum of ten thousand dollars, which makes it the largest such award in any province in Canada.

Each ward recipient will also receive a signed limited edition copy of a watercolour by renowned Saskatchewan artist Dorothy Knowles. Dorothy has gifted the original to the Guild.

Henry & Cheryl Kloppenburg are Saskatchewan folks, through and through. They are generous supporters of the arts, both nationally and provincially, and have supported writing and the SWG for almost 20 years through their gifts to the SWG’s Grain Magazine. Here they are, flanked by the Guild’s past-president, Bob Calder and me, next to the painting.

The great Canadian man of letters, the late Roberson Davies, admonished a cure-all of “massive daily doses of art, music and literature. On Saturday evening at his book launch Yann Martel was the latest of many authors to state that without reading one cannot be a writer. Both make the point that reading is a vital part of our culture, so this award is for those who have given us the chance to read and enjoy good writing.

Yann Martel book launch

Link
Saturday night was book night. I attended the “at home” (Saskatoon) launch of Yann Martel’s new novel Beatrice and Virgil. and of course purchased this copy that you see resting on my Mac. Beatrice and Virgil are the main characters in Dante’s Divine Comedy, and hell features throughout those famous works. No wonder Yann chose them in a story about the Holocaust. Even the “howl” in howler monkey fits the theme.

Martel studied philosophy at university and when one learns this one realizes why his work has so many layers and depths to it. Even the names of the animals in the story have significance. Not just the donkey and the howler monkey, that are the names in the title, but the dog and cat, which are respectively named Erasmus and Mendelssohn. Erasmus was the remarkable humanist and theologian who lived during the Reformation and was, as Yann put it, very practical. The Mendelssohn he used was neither of the great composers Felix or his sister Fanny, but their grandfather Moses who was a prominent German Jew during the 18th century’s “Age of Enlightenment” during which reason and common sense were held to be the primary source and legitimacy for authority.

As most know the book is a novel about the Holocaust, and when he was questioned as to why he wrote a novel about those horrible events he replied that non-fiction needs to become stories in order to survive. There are all kinds of stories in film plays and book about the Second World War and the Vietnam War, but few, beyond the TV series M.A.S.H., about the Korean War, which is maybe why it has faded in the collective memory.

Yann also told us that the novel he is now working on is features three chimpanzees in Portugal. With the two published books and one in the works, he has covered a gamut of the animal kingdom, especially the great apes. Apart from its famous tiger Life of Pi has an orangutan, the new one chimps. Someone else is writing about bonobos. What next? Will a silverback feature in number four?

Images from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desiderius_Erasmus and commons.wikimedia.org