Montreal’s Sean Michaels makes $100,000 Giller short list on wedding anniversary

TORONTO – Montreal writer Sean Michaels had two reasons to celebrate on Monday — his first-year wedding anniversary and his spot on the Scotiabank Giller Prize short list for his debut novel, “Us Conductors.”

In some customs, paper is the traditional gift for married couples to give each other on their first anniversary, so the two milestones seemed a perfect pairing.

“It’s a very bookish paper anniversary,” the 32-year-old said by phone shortly after hearing he was a finalist for the $100,000 prize.

“We were already planning to have a nice dinner tonight, so we’ll go out for a nice meal and try to enjoy the moment and not cling to it too tightly, either.”

Michaels, the only first-time novelist on this year’s short list, said making it this far was more than he ever expected.

“A short list like this, it’s very humbling and I feel very lucky to have been honoured by the jury,” said the music journalist, who also writes short stories and founded the pioneering MP3 blog Said the Gramophone.

“But really, just being on the long list for me felt like all that I could have asked for with this book and this journey so far.”

The other five authors in the running for the prestigious Giller include Toronto-based 2004 finalist Miriam Toews, whose nominated novel “All My Puny Sorrows” (Knopf Canada) is also on the short list for this year’s Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.

Toronto-based David Bezmozgis, who made the Giller short list in 2011, is a contender this year with the novel “The Betrayers” (HarperCollins Canada).

The rest are also established writers but first-time finalists: Frances Itani of Ottawa for her novel “Tell” (HarperCollins), Montreal’s Heather O’Neill for the novel “The Girl Who Was Saturday Night” (HarperCollins) and Edmonton native Padma Viswanathan for the novel “The Ever After of Ashwin Rao” (Random House).

This year, 161 books were submitted by 63 publishers. The jury panel consists of Canadian author Shauna Singh Baldwin, British novelist Justin Cartwright, and American writer Francine Prose.

“There were some themes I detected, one of which was Canadians going abroad and having experiences there which changed their lives and quite often brought them back,” said Cartwright. “There was a lot of feeling for what the country is like and what it means and the attraction of it.”

Michaels’ novel, published by Random House Canada, is an exception to that theme.

The story is based on the life and loves of Lev Termen, the Russian-born inventor of the theremin, one of the first electronic musical instruments. Through flashbacks and correspondence, readers follow the scientist and spy from New York in the 1930s to the gulags of the Soviet Union under Stalin.

“There were some ideas that I wanted to explore about love and delusion and responsibility and things like that, and one day I started to think about the way that they braided with the story of Lev Termen, which I’d heard from a friend a few years before,” said Michaels, who was born in Scotland and raised in Ottawa.

“He had this very, very strange life that has kind of been romanticized, and I was almost interested in the way that that romantic version of the story seemed a little bit incomplete. So as much as ‘Us Conductors’ is full of romance, I think it’s also intending to question a little bit some of the romantic story in it.”

Michaels said his research process took him to New York and Russia, and had him listening to theremin music. He even has two of the instruments now, one of which was built by his father.

“Us Conductors” is “both in many places true but the overall gist of it is a humongous lie and an invention,” he said.

This year the Giller prize purse has increased to $140,000, with $100,000 to the winner and $10,000 to each finalist. Organizers say that makes it the richest fiction prize in Canada.

“Internationally it sort of puts it on the same level as the Booker Prize,” said Jack Rabinovitch, who founded the prize 21 years ago in honour of his late wife, literary journalist Doris Giller.

“The key ingredient is helping to sell the books, because writers want their books read, and I hope the fact that the prize has doubled will help people alert themselves to reading the books.”

The Scotiabank Giller Prize will air on CBC-TV on Nov. 10.

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Note to readers: This is a corrected story. A previous version had the incorrect spelling for David Bezmozgis.