1979 Governor General's Awards

Each winner of the 1979 Governor General's Awards for Literary Merit was selected by a panel of judges administered by the Canada Council for the Arts. The 1979 awards were the first in which a list of finalists was released a month before the presentation of the awards. This was done to attract more publicity.

English Language

Fiction

Winner:
*Jack Hodgins, "The Resurrection of Joseph Bourne"

Other Finalists:
*Margaret Atwood, "Life Before Man"
*Matt Cohen, "The Sweet Second Summer of Kitty Malone"

Poetry and Drama

Winner:
*Michael Ondaatje, "There's a Trick with a Knife I'm Learning to Do"

Other Finalists:
*Erin Mouré, "Empire, York Street"
*Susan Musgrave, "A Man to Marry, a Man to Bury"

Non-fiction

Winner:
*Maria Tippett, "Emily Carr"

Other Finalists:
*Robert Bothwell and William Kilbourn, "C.D. Howe"
*Larry Pratt and John Richards, "Prairie Capitalism"

French Language

Fiction

Winner:
*Marie-Claire Blais, "Le Sourd dans la ville"

Other Finalists:
*Suzanne Jacob, "La Survie"
*Suzanne Paradis, "Miss Charlie"

Poetry and Drama

Winner:
*Robert Mélançon, "Peinture aveugle"

Other Finalists:
*Marcel Bélanger, "Migrations"
*André Roy, "Les passions du samedi"

Non-fiction

Winner:
*Dominique Clift and Sheila McLeod Arnopoulos, "Le fait anglais au Québec"

Other Finalists:
*Daniel Latouche, "Une société de l'ambiguïté"
*Pierre Nepveu, "Les mots à l'écoute"

Other Governor General's Awards: