Nisga'a writer Jordan Abel shocked to win Governor General's Literary Award

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 being asked to serve the senior role in what is still a colonial system of governance."

Empty Spaces is among the 14 titles, seven in English and seven in French, that were acknowledged by the Governor General's Literary Awards as the best books of the year earlier this month. 

Abel spoke to CBC's Daybreak North host Caroline de Ryk following his big win.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What ran through your mind when you heard your name announced as the Governor General's winner for best fiction?

Shock and surprise. Empty Spaces is a book that I love quite a bit. It's also an extremely difficult book, so I was not expecting anything like this. But it is an incredible surprise to hear that it was the winner.

Why do you both love it but also find it difficult?

It's difficult formally because it's a 70,000-word novel and there are no human characters and there's no dialogue. The formal structure is based on very particular kinds of repetition. So, on the one hand, you know, it feels very familiar on a sentence-by-sentence level because it's mostly writing about the lands. And on the other hand, as a novel, I think it feels very different than most novels feel. 

The love part of it is that this is an allegorical book, and it's a book that's about being Indigenous but being displaced from my traditional territory. It's about being an urban Indigenous person but not being able to connect back in a physical and geographical way to the lands that I'm from. That's the love part of it.