Hey, congrats on getting into grad school, Hamish!
Looks like you’ve got your work cut out for you - a list of ‘the best’ Canadian authors soon turns into a list of Canadian authors !
Two of my favourites haven’t been mentioned: Michael Ondaatje (a fantastic poet as well as novelist) and Rohintin Mistry.
Chalk up another huge Robertson Davies fan - I have a signed first edition set of his Deptford Trilogy.
Congrats on grad school, Hamish. I think that, whether you like him or not, any discussion of great Canadian novelists needs to include John Ralston Saul.
If you’re interested in 19th Century Canadian literature, you might want to check out this link, which is a scanned copy of a speech given by George Stewart to the Canadian Club in New York City (in 1871, I think), about Canadian literature. While he mentions that there isn’t much Canadian literature (because Canadians are too busy building a country to write books), he does point out some authors he finds significant.
http://www.canadiana.org/ECO/PageView/29148/0005?id=aec029eb07a37089
He also points out something else that retarded Canadian publishing. He says that, under British copyright law, in Canada and Australia, the author only could claim copyright within his province. His or her works weren’t protected anywhere else.
Well, Service lived everywhere.
Yes, yes I do. Sheesh. I didn’t think that looked quite right when I typed it.
Robert Service was born in England to Scottish parents, and moved to Canada in his twenties.
[hijack]He also moved to France in his thirties, where he married and eventually died. As Captain Amazing said, during all this time, “Service lived everywhere”. Not everywhere in the Stompin’ Tom sense of all over Canada, but in the L.A., New Orleans, the Balkans, Tahiti, France, sense of everywhere. His work from his time in the Yukon is certainly the essence of Canadian, but I’m not sure the man himself was. Canada made him rich, so maybe he identified himself as Canadian, but as far as I can tell he was as much a citizen of France as he was of Canada.[/hijack]
Three Cheers For Me by Donald Jack
Volume I of the Bandy Papers
Winner of the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour
Vols. II & III are well worth reading too.
An overlooked classic, in my opinion, is the poet Earle Birney’s novel Turvey, winner of the 1949 Leacock Prize. A darkly farcical look at the Canadian military bureaucratic machine during WW2, it follows the misadventures of an innocent from Skookum Falls, British Columbia. A little “Good Soldier Schweik” and a slight foreshadowing of “Catch-22;” worth reading. Although set during a world war, it’s not a “war book;” it’s about people caught up in a giant machine; it’s not about combat or fighting, either.
Birney had a great ear for the bawdy dialogue of the common soldiery (without recourse to four-letter words), and this is reflected in the book. The whole book has the ring of truth, as it is based on his experiences in WW2 (and on his varied work experiences during the Great Depression).
Hey, I like Atwood.
But we do have quite a few good SF writers, don’t we? The work of SF I read while going for my degree was Elizabeth Vonarburg’s Reluctant Voyagers (translated from Voyageurs malgré eux). Very creepy, but I think part of it hinges on knowing Montreal geography, because her alternate history erases a number of key buildings from the landscape without ever pointing out this detail…
Thank you, and thanks to MoonIndigo1 for adding to my list of French-Canadian authors. I grew up in the BC school system, which did its best to pretend French Canada did not exist, so it’s my first time seeing most of those names.
On the subject of French authors, I’ve read a little bit about Michel Tremblay’s life, but I have yet any of his work except one short story. Anyone have any recommendations?
My first year on this board, I quoted Saul incessantly. My first GD thread, on the limits of reason, was inspired by Voltaire’s Bastards. I’ve read all his non-fiction, and I was completely engrossed. His ideas helped shape my philosophies at a critical juncture in my life.
Still, I wasn’t too impressed with his fiction. I only read Baraka. I know enough about his life to know that chunks of it are autobiographical – which made it interesting in that regard – but I didn’t like the style very much. Odd for a novel of international intrigue, I found it a little dull.
Thanks. I’ll look it over.
And thanks you to everyone who’s congratulating me on getting into grad school. I’m happy about it, and looking forward to it.
Birney had a great ear for language. I think he’s at his best when he plays with it. I’ve never read any of his fiction, but if his skill with language carries over, it should be great reading.
(Nice username, by the way. I grew up in Esquimalt, and my father is a military history buff, so we made a number of trips up to that fort)
I forgot to mention Marie-Claire Blais. *Une Saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel * would be a good place to start. Réjean Ducharme is a significant Canadian author also. *L’Avalée des avalés * is a darkly humourous absurd tale. Louis Caron (Le Canard de bois) is another fine writer.
Michel Tremblay is mostly known for his plays, though he has written a number of somewhat autobiographical novels. His best-known plays are Les Belles-soeurs, Ste-Carmen de la Main, Albertine en cinq temps, A Toi pour toujours, ta Marie-Lou.
In any given year, one or more of his plays are likely to be produced in Montreal, Hamish, so keep your eyes open. BTW, Les Belles-Soeurs was rather successful in Scotland-- an adaptation entitled “The Guid Sisters”. I’d say you should go with the most obvious, his best known work (Les Belles-soeurs)
One other I haven’t seen mentioned yet is Alistair MacLeod. Also Guy Vanderhaeghe - though I’ve only read The Englishman’s Boy and I’m honestly not sure what lit critics think of his work in general. Both are relatively recent additions to the CanLit scene.
On a non-fiction/historical note I would include David MacFarlane, for his wonderful The Danger Tree.
And another vote for Robertson Davies.
Hey, Hamish!
If you visited between 1980 and 1998, and ever spoke to the interpretive staff (or came on a school tour), chances are it was either a tall, thin guy or a medium height fat guy. I was the fat guy! (I still work there, but I’m not longer a fat guy, and no longer doing interpretation, but curatorial).
I use what little influence I have to make the summer students we get every year read “Turvey,” just because a) it has vague theme connections to our military history period themes; b) kids should read more anyhow (especially Canadian writers); c) I’d like to think that maybe a few of them will realize that “pre-1999” doesn’t automatically mean “old and busted.”
On reading Birney’s bio, I see that he was a Selection Officer in the Canadian Army–which means that he made himself the bumbling, least likeable character in the novel. Heh. I like that.
(Needless to say, you and Matt get a free ride in the 1942 jeep if you come for a visit!)
I figure Atwood is a love/hate thing - either you love her or flat-out hate her. I don’t love her. 
I read a sci-fi book way back when that was set in a future Edmonton - I can’t for the life of me think of the book, but it was a very pleasant change to read a book set in my world, rather than somewhere in the U.S. or Great Britain.
Featherlou, could the book be The Night Watch, by Sean Stewart? Not a bad read, not a great writer either, but I know what you mean: I too like reading books set in a familiar décor.
This may be a good place to ask this.
I was in the bookstore. I was buying Oryx and Crake and Possession on tape. The clerk recommended (based on this) a new female Canadian author, but I cannot remember the name. The book was something about a family and everything looks normal when you start the book…but it isn’t.
Any ideas?
Finally, a chance to put my two-and-a-half years working on a M.A. in Western Canadian literature to some real use.
Canonical:
Admittedly, I don’t know anyone who’d ever call Roughing it in the Bush, by Susanna Moodie, their favorite work of literature. But it’s one of the earliest texts to come out of Canada, and it documents the struggle of early European settlers trying to establish themselves in Upper Canada.
Such is My Beloved, by Morley Callaghan, is the story of a priest whose idealistic life is destroyed because of his relationship with a prostitute. Written in the 1930s, it’s one of my favorite Canadian novels.
Stephen Leacock’s satires of small-town and urban Canadian life, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town and Arcadian Adventures of the Idle Rich, are considered landmarks of modern satire. The Leacock award is given anually to the best humourous piece of Canadian fiction.
Go into any Canadian highschool, and chances are students will have read either The Diviners or The Stone Angel, two novels by Maragaret Laurence about the constraints of being a progressive woman in a small town.
Robertson Davies and Margaret Atwood are internationally renowned, but I don’t know if there’s one particular work of theirs that would be considered “canonical.” I guess it would likely be Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (though in my survey course in second-year we read The Edible Woman - a poor choice, I thought) and either Davies’ Leaven of Malice or something from his Deptford Trilogy.
Most people are familiar with Mordecai Richler’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. Alice Munro has a number of wonderful short story collections (or “cycles,” as we debated pretentiously throughout my two short-story seminars), with The Moons of Jupiter and Who Do You Think You Are? being probably the most critically renowned.
Favorites:
I’ve mentioned this in other threads, and I’ll stand by my opinion that Timothy Findley’s The Wars is the most powerful, well-crafted Canadian work of literature ever written. It’s a stunningly sad and sensitive look at the inhumanity of WWI - which sounds clichéed and done before, but trust me, it’s an amazing read. I’ve read it three times, front-to-back, in one sitting each time. It just doesn’t lose any of its power on multiple readings.
While not about Canada, Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance is worth looking at as an example of how diverse and multicultural Canadian literature can be. Set in Indira Gandhi’s India, it examines the lives of four characters and how their choices are constrained by politics, caste, religion, and so on. At over 700 pages it’s quite a read, but it’s one of the few books that made me so angry (in a good way, of course) that I almost opened a pit thread about it.
I’ve been researching Guy Vanderhaeghe for my thesis, and he has so much wonderful material that it’s hard to pick just one text. The Englishman’s Boy won the Governor General’s award, and is probably his most well-known text, but even better, I think, is his most recent novel The Last Crossing. Which wasn’t even nominated for the GG - a major oversight. A professor of American literature I once had claimed that twenty or thirty years from now, Canadians would be reading Vanderhaeghe with the same reverence that Americans have for Steinbeck and Hemingway.
I think Douglas Coupland’s best novel isn’t Generation X, but Microserfs, which I approached with some trepidation because - being the Luddite that I am - I know dick-all about computers, the dot.com industry, and technology in general. But it was immediately accessible. I loved the innocence and naivete of the characters - it’s refreshing when a writer can write about youth and urbanity without being cynical and jaded.
On the other hand, Russell Smith writes some wonderful satire about urban Ontario. Check out his short story collection Young Men.
There’s a plethora of Aboriginal literature in Canada, and it’s definitely an emerging field of study. (So if you’re looking for a job when you get out, pay attention. ;)) Again, the most “canonical” texts are probably Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water and two works by Tomson Highway, the play Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing and the novel Kiss of the Fur Queen. If you’ve read any William Falkner, you’d probably have a good grasp of Highway. Drew Hayden Taylor’s plays, notably alterNatives, are both politically charged and bitingly funny.
I’m sure I could go on, but I’m feeling guilty, having now put more effort into this post than the last two months of my thesis. 
Oh, and Dangerosa, the female author wasn’t Gloria Sawai, was it?
The book to try of his is his first novel, “The Birds of Prey”. It’s about this writer trying to investigate the plane crash that killed General Ailleret. the French Chief of Staff. It’s a weird thing about Saul that his novels are sort of more popular outside of Canada than inside it. Birds of Prey is still extremely popular in France (where it was first published, under the title “Mort d’un General”, and “The Paradise Eater” won this really prestigious Italian award for literature.