His first novel,No Great Mischief(1999), which like
his short stories focuses on Cape Breton and the
Gaelic heritage, won critical acclaim and the
Trillium Award. Like MacLeod, Rudy Wiebe was
known for his association with a particular place, the
Canadian West, and the people who live there. Like
many of his earlier works, his eighth novel,A Discov-
er y of Strangers(1994), shows how English explorers
were unwilling to understand the peoples they en-
countered. Another book that Wiebe published dur-
ing the decade, however, was very different from
anything he had written previously. Wiebe became
interested in Yvonne Johnson, a descendant of the
famous Cree chief Big Bear who had written Wiebe
from prison. The result was a coauthored work,
Stolen Life: The Journey of a Cree Woman(1998). It was a
finalist for the 1998 Governor General’s Award for
Nonfiction.
Female Writers and the Issue of Identity Canada’s
female writers, too, were often extremely versatile.
Anne Hébert (1916-2000) publishedL’Enfant chargé
de songes(1992;Burden of Dreams, 1994), which won
the Governor General’s Award for French-Language
Fiction, and three years later brought out an impres-
sive volume of poetry. Another of Canada’s most fa-
mous writers, Margaret Atwood, won a Trillium
Award for a collection of short stories,Wilderness Tips
(1991), shared a Trillium Award for her psychologi-
cal novelThe Robber Bride(1993), and two years later
again shared a Trillium Award, this time for a poetry
collection titledMorning in the Burned House(1995).
Atwood’sAlias Grace(1996), which won the Giller
Prize, is a historical novel based on an 1843 murder
case. Though the plotline is about the title charac-
ter’s guilt or innocence, the theme of the novel is the
question of identity.
In works by Canada’s male writers, the identity is-
sue most often involves responding to an ethnic her-
itage or seeking one’s place in a diverse and ever-
changing society. For female writers, the issue of
identity is even more complex. After centuries of be-
ing confined to rigid roles, many women were at-
tempting to find out who they really were. It is hardly
surprising that Canada’s female writers made the
search for personal identity one of their major
themes.
There is no shortage of examples. Wendy Lill’s
playSisters(pb. 1991) focuses on the denial of per-
sonal identity to the women assigned to teach in resi-
dential native schools. Similarly, Sandra Birdsell’s
fiction shows how women were deprived of a sense of
self in an isolated, rural society. Her novelThe
Chrome Suite(1992) is about a young woman’s ven-
ture into the past in an attempt to understand the
person she has become. Most of the women in the
short fiction of Alice Munro and in the novels of
Carol Shields (1935-2003) also search for their iden-
tities. Both writers attained international recogni-
tion early in the decade. Munro’sFriend of My Youth
(1990) won a Trillium Award, and Shields’s novel
The Stone Diaries(1993) won the Governor General’s
Award and the Pulitzer Prize.Variety and Diversity During the 1990’s, all Cana-
dian writers looked at broad psychological issues.
Shields’sLarr y’s Party(1997) points out how the out-
ward appearance of a forty-seven-year old man belies
the richness of his inner life.The Selected Stories of
Mavis Gallant (1996) emphasizes the feelings of
alienation that make Gallant’s characters so un-
happy. In her third novel, Away(1993), which
brought her a shared Trillium Award, Jane Urquhart
showed how the O’Malleys’ Irish heritage haunts
them in their Canadian home. In Urquhart’sThe
Underpainter(1997), which won the Governor Gen-
eral’s Award for English-Language Fiction, an el-
derly artist realizes that by repeatedly choosing art
instead of real life, he has become alienated from
humanity and even from his art.
A number of new writers gained prominence dur-
ing the 1990’s. Bonnie Burnard won the Giller Prize
for her family sagaA Good House(1999); Yann Martel
wrote a novel calledSelf(1996), the story of an unex-
pected gender change; and Diane Schoemperlen
produced a woodcut-illustrated short-story collec-
tion,Forms of Devotion(1998), which won the Gover-
nor General’s Award for English-Language Fiction.
Other new writers explored their own cultural iden-
tities, among them the dramatist Djanet Sears,
whose playHarlem Duet(pb. 1997) won a Governor
General’s Award in 1998; the Caribbean poet
Marlene Nourbese Philip; the Japanese Canadian
authors Joy Kogawa and Kerri Sakamoto; the Chi-
nese Canadian writer Wayson Choy, who shared a
Trillium Award for his novelThe Jade Peony(1995);
and M. G. Vassanji, an Indian from East Africa, who
won the Giller Prize forThe Book of Secrets(1994). An-
other fiction writer, Rohinton Mistry, established an
international reputation by re-creating the world heThe Nineties in America Literature in Canada 519