by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

I got a posh-looking invite to the city book award ceremony. I hadn’t known of the award because mainly I hate books a lot. But each year the city gives out $15,000 of our tax bucks for the best book published here or written by a resident of our fair isle. I figured I had a crack at it since I wrote an unprecedentedly amazing book with my brother J.D., Montreal: The Unknown City. But no nomination for us. Even my ideas of including pop-up pages and more nudity in our book wouldn’t have helped its chances, as I found out.

The book award was invented in 1965 by then-Mayor Jean Drapeau and was open to English and French texts of all sorts. In year one, top judge Léon Lortie described the 40 books as “nothing outstanding,” which must have made winner Réal Benoît feel great. Guys named Giguère, Ouellet, Basile, Dumont and Marcotte won it in subsequent years, leading Drapeau to say, “The public should not make the mistake of thinking that the prize is awarded only to French works.” Good God! Why would anybody think that!?

So what happens next? Gaston Miron, a poet into every hardcore anti-English group from the RIN, the MLP, PSQ, MUFQ and FQF, wins and gives a thousand bucks to the FRAP for the “libération du pueple.” Meanwhile, Mordecai Richler’s St. Urbain’s Horseman, which bagged a Governor General’s award, got doodley squat. The publisher had to be based in the now former City of Montreal, so defining Montrealia like Don Bell’s Saturday Night at the Bagel Factory was ineligible. That rule was later changed but it made no difference.

The prize was briefly administered by the Montreal Urban Community, which shut it down in 1982, and the city resuscitated it in 1987.

This year, quite unusually, an English-language work reached the final five, although it was Mark Abley’s weepy work on dying languages. Abley got federal grants to travel around the world to research disappearing tongues. Two of the hosts at the ceremony congratulated Abley for spotlighting the evil of English, which has spread its oppressive tyranny on everything except these book awards, apparently.

So the 34th Montréal Grand Prix du Livre ceremony—once a gala fêted by 1,200 invitees—was held this week before 80 people at the city library. For the 34th straight time, the prize was presented to a French-language work. One of the five judges was also the translator of the winning work. Small world, ain’t it?

So imagine you start a contest that exclusively welcomes white and black people. Then you award the white person 34 times straight. Makes you squirm, don’t it?

I phoned up the boss of the awards to bug him about all this. “The only criterion is the excellence and the quality of the book, point à la ligne,” says Normand Biron. He also speculates that French books always win because “90 per cent of the books we receive are in French” and he also irrelevantly notes that there are plenty of other English language awards elsewhere.

Longtime local publisher Simon Dardick of Véhicule Press objects. “I think we’re a sophisticated city. It would be the sign of that sophistication that, regardless of language, the best book would win. You can’t accept the argument that the best Montreal book 34 times in a row was in French.”

So Richler, Anne Carson, Irv Layton, Yann Martel and other widely decorated local soldiers of literature weren’t good enough for their own burg. Greats like Hugh Hood and Louis Dudek even served on the jury a few times, but even that didn’t help them win later.

Denis Vanier—the late badboy of junkie biker poets—was a nice guy. I visited his apartment near the Cheval Blanc and read his tiny poetry books, but there’s no way he deserved the nod over William Weintraub’s excellent City Unique.

With the megacity comes massive new numbers of anglo Montrealers. This makes the ongoing snub all the more bitter.

Comments? kgravy@openface.ca