Kate Cayley and Jordan Tannahill among Governor General's Literary Award winners

TORONTO · Fourteen authors have been named winners of the Governor General's Literary Awards, the Canada Council for the Arts announced Monday. Each winner receives a prize of $25,000. Toronto author Kate Cayley won the fiction prize for her debut novel "Property," which follows characters in a gentrifying west-end neighbourhood after a death. Playwright Jordan Tannahill took the drama award for his play "Prince Faggot," a fictional work about a gay Prince George.

Cayley said the award feels like finding yourself "in one of your own daydreams." She described feeling "incredibly lucky and grateful" to be recognized by one of Canada's oldest and most prestigious literary prizes. "These kinds of awards mean that you keep writing," Cayley said. "That you feel both supported in your writing, recognized by your peers, and also that the fact that it's monetary means that you can kind of just keep going."

Her novel, which she began writing during a 2022 COVID-19 lockdown, was inspired by Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway." Cayley called it "almost a rewriting" of that classic stream-of-consciousness work. "I kind of wanted to write a novel in which you are really feeling the weight of the kind of ordinary interior," she said. "You're having the same thoughts over again. You are sort of half-thinking about a fight with your partner and half-thinking about your grocery list."

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Cayley's book also won the $20,000 Toronto Book Award this week. She calls "Property" a "very Toronto book" inspired "partly by a rat infestation in my house." "Rats are a big part of this novel," said Cayley, who lives in the city's west end. She said readers hover above the characters knowing something will happen, and she likes to think "when it does come, it's not quite what we expected." Jordan Tannahill's win marks his third Governor General's Literary Award, having previously won the drama prize in 2014 and 2018. The 38-year-old playwright said the latest honour is a "profound honour" and a validation from his peers. "I'm in a different place in my life now than when I won it back in 2018 or 2014," Tannahill said of his earlier wins for "Age of Minority" and "Botticelli in the Fire."

Inspired by a royal photograph

Tannahill wrote "Prince Faggot" in 2020 while living in London. The play imagines a future where Prince George, the eldest son of the Prince and Princess of Wales, is a gay man. Its inspiration was a 2017 photograph of a young Prince George that reminded Tannahill of pictures of himself as a child. He said the photo led him to "meditate on this idea of queer childhood" and "give language to this, particularly at a time in which the very idea of this is such a kind of volatile, politically volatile discourse." The playwright said the resulting fictional narrative of the heir to the British throne "really resembled very much my own (life) and very much the struggle that I went through as a gay man." He said the provocative title came to him early and serves as an invitation "for an audience to consider their relationship with that word." "And I'm not offended if people say the title and I also understand if they don't," Tannahill said.

In other categories, Trina Moyles won the non-fiction award for her memoir "Black Bear: A Story of Siblinghood and Survival." Gillian Sze received the poetry prize for "An Orange, A Syllable." Katia Grubisic won the French-to-English translation award for "Together by the Sea," while Kristy Jackson took the young people's text award for "Touching Grass." Matthew Forsythe won the young people's illustrated books category for "Aggie and the Ghost." Separate French-language categories honour francophone writing.

With files from The Canadian Press, CP24 and Winnipeg Free Press