Boyden: His Time

By David Topping

Joseph Boyden has won the Giller Prize—you know, “Canada’s Premier Prize for Fiction”!—for Through Black Spruce, a novel that this year’s jury of Margaret Atwood, Bob Rae, and Colm Toibin praised for “show[ing] us unforgettable characters and a northern landscape in a way we have never seen them before.” (It’s a bit of a surprise pick: Mary Swan’s The Boys in the Trees was the “overwhelming” winner of the Guess The Giller contest, according to their press release earlier in the day.) The Globe, Post, Star, and CTV all have more details from the gala.