RANDOM HOUSE DOMINATE CANADIAN PUBLISHING
Stuart Woods writing in Quill & Quire, October 21.


It certainly wasn't a banner year for small presses at the 2008 Governor General’s Literary Awards shortlist announcement, which took place at Ben McNally Books in downtown Toronto on Tuesday.
All five non-fiction slots went to Random House of Canada imprints or to McClelland & Stewart, which is 25%-owned by Random. And despite being nearly shut out of the Giller Prize shortlist, Random House imprint Doubleday Canada scooped three of the fiction shortlist slots.
Even more remarkable is the fact that five of the 10 titles on the two lists were edited by Doubleday Canada editorial director Martha Kanya-Forstner: Nino Ricci’s novel The Origin of Species, about an unhappy Montreal grad student; Fred Stenson’s The Great Karoo, a novel about Canadians in the Boer War; Fifteen Days, journalist Christie Blatchford’s “embedded” account of Canada’s troops in Afghanistan; former Médecins sans Frontières doctor James Orbinski’s memoir An Imperfect Offering; and Douglas Hunter’s God’s Mercies, an historical account of the rivalry between explorers Samuel de Champlain and Henry Hudson.Read the full piece at Quill & Quire.