Richard B. Wright - A St. Catharine’s Giller Award Winner

The Giller Award is the biggest literary prize in Canada, given each year to the author whose work of fiction is deemed the most deserving by a panel of judges, which includes critics, journalists, and publishers. The award is generally believed to contribute not only to the prestige of the author who receives it, but also to the sales success of the book in question as well, although this is not always the case.

As of 2001, St. Catharine’s, Ontario, could boast its own resident Giller prize winner when Richard B. Wright walked off with the award for his hugely successful novel, Clara Callan. The novel is set in Canada during the years of the Great Depression, the main character a spinster schoolteacher and her vivacious and somewhat impractical sister Nora. Clara secretly longs for the openness that Nora embraces, and the novel is written in the form of the sister’s letters and diaries.

Clara has sold over 200,000 copies in Canada, and the fact that the novel took home the Giller convinced publishers to release all of Wright’s previous novels again as well (he had written eight previous to Clara).

Wright himself is a lifetime Ontario resident, born in Midland in 1937. He attended university at the Ryerson Institute of Technology in the 1950s, and briefly flirted with various media positions while writing, and eventually took on a job at MacMillan Canada, where he moved from editing to sales. His first commercially available book was written in the 1960s, and was a children’s mystery novel.

Wright penned his first adult oriented novel during a brief sojourn out of province, when he and his wife moved to the Gaspe Peninsula. The Weekend Man had limited commercial success after its release, but today it is recognized as a minor Canadian classic.

Today Wright makes his home in the city of St. Catharines, and will often take interviews at local hot spots, intimately familiar with the pulse of the town. Since the release of Clara Callan Wright has enjoyed success with subsequent novels Adultery and Final Things. All of Wright’s novels point signify his talent as a deeply motivated and diverse writer, as even after the success of Clara he refuses to succumb to the temptation to follow a formula with his writing, turning out efforts which are as diverse in character and story line as one author could make them.

The Royal Henley Regatta in Canada has been based out of Martindale Pond in St. Catharines since 1903, and has been crowning champions for 125 years.