Nisga’a writer Jordan Abel’s Empty Spaces has won a Governor General’s Literary Award, an annual prize that honours Canadian excellence in literature and awards the winners $25,000 to boot.
Abel’s novel reimagines James Fenimore Cooper’s 19th-century text The Last of the Mohicans from a modern urban perspective, as he explores what it means to be Indigenous without access to familial territory and complicates popular understandings about Indigenous storytelling.
Seeing the book win a prize from a colonial institution like the governor general was surprising, Abel said.
“Maybe it signals some of the changes that have happened over the last 10 or 20 years in Canadian literary awards.”
Canada’s Governor General is Mary Simon, an Inuk woman from Kangiqsualujjuaq in northeastern Quebec and Canada’s first Indigenous governor general. When she was appointed to the role, Simon said it was an “important step forward on the long path towards reconciliation.”
At the time, the Native Women’s Association of Canada congratulated Simon but said she “is …