From Biggie to Buffy, Giller finalists share their pop culture influences

TORONTO – From rap music to social movements to “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” the Scotiabank Giller Prize finalists drew from a wide array of influences to write books that contribute to the cultural conversation.

Five writers are vying to win the $100,00 honour at a Toronto gala on Monday. The nominees told The Canadian Press about the touchstones that shaped their shortlisted titles.

The authors’ written responses have been edited and condensed for clarity.

Tsering Yangzom Lama, nominated for “We Measure the Earth With Our Bodies”

CP: What piece of pop culture has had the biggest impact on your approach to writing?

Lama: Contemporary social movements including Black Lives Matter and Land Back (as well as the wider transnational Indigenous movement) have been important to me and my thinking. Like many writers, I owe a great debt to the artists and thinkers of these communities and lineages.

CP: Where might readers be able to see that influence in your work?

Lama: I think it’s everywhere in my writing: the desire to decentre the hegemonic or colonial gaze and to centre the Tibetan story; the celebration of an indigenous world view (Tibetan in this case) and to focus on how it interacts with the western world view; the willingness to look directly at a historic scale of grievances and trauma we have endured and to find the particular beauty of the spirit that can arise from such pain. On and on. I feel a great debt to Toni Morrison, in particular, for her words and spirit.

CP: To what extent do you strive to achieve “timelessness” in your writing, and how do cultural references play into that?

Lama: “Timelessness” is not something I aspire to consciously. Whether a work transcends its moment is really out of the writer’s hand, but has everything to do with the reception of that work by the broader culture. I strive for emotional and intellectual honesty, and for beauty in my language.

Suzette Mayr, nominated for “The Sleeping Car Porter”

CP: What piece of pop culture has had the biggest impact on your approach to writing?

Mayr: Visually sumptuous and sexy supernatural TV shows like “Penny Dreadful,” “Supernatural,” “Witches of East End,” “A Discovery of Witches,” “What We Do in the Shadows,” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

CP: Where might readers be able to see that influence in your work?

Mayr: There’s always some evidence of the supernatural or the “weird” in every book I’ve written so far, and the supernatural is usually used by or used in service of the repressed and the vulnerable.

CP: To what extent do you strive to achieve “timelessness” in your writing, and how do cultural references play into that?

Mayr: I think there are a few things about humans that are timeless that I like to tap into: humans fall in love and love can lead them to break rules they wouldn’t otherwise break; many humans have animal companions that they love very much and sometimes identify with more than other human animals; and, lastly, humans can be funny. In all the supernatural TV shows I’m attracted to, there’s forbidden love that leads to characters making questionable choices or sacrifices, and there’s smart, sometimes subtle humour. There are also beings who are part animal or part super-animal. Also there’s velvet. I can’t get enough of the velvet.

Kim Fu, nominated for “Lesser-Known Monsters of the 21st Century”

CP: What piece of pop culture has had the biggest impact on your approach to writing?

Fu: Probably the 2004 movie “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet play ex-lovers who undergo a memory-erasing procedure. I saw it three times in theatres when I was 16.

CP: Where might readers be able to see that influence in your work?

Fu: The movie’s formal inventiveness, its unflashy, human-scale approach to science-fiction conceits, its generous, tender sense of humour, how it plays with memory and time — I wish I could do any of that half as well. “Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century” wears this influence pretty clearly on its sleeve. The opening story “Pre-Simulation Consultation XF007867,” a conversation between the operator and client of a virtual reality simulator that hooks directly into your brain, and the story “Twenty Hours,” about a married couple that murder each other and reprint copies of their bodies, are especially similar in tone.

CP: To what extent do you strive to achieve “timelessness” in your writing, and how do cultural references play into that?

Fu: I don’t tend to include a lot of direct references in my work. My stories and novels are often set in made-up or unspecified places, with fictional brands and works of art, metaphorical and proxy versions that I can bend to suit my needs. (Though there is one story in the collection about a YouTube/Instagram influencer.) But I think that’s just an esthetic preference, and doesn’t necessarily make work any more or less timeless. I’m still very much concerned with the anxieties of the moment, and being in conversation with other work coming out right now.

Rawi Hage, nominated for “Stray Dogs”

CP: What piece of pop culture has had the biggest impact on your approach to writing?

Hage: Rap music. I think Notorious B.I.G. (Biggie) is a great poet!

CP: Where might readers be able to see that influence in your work?

Hage: In some of my long rhythmic passages.

CP: To what extent do you strive to achieve “timelessness” in your writing, and how do cultural references play into that?

Hage: With this collection I tried to keep my lens wide, giving the various stories and characters, even when they are rooted in particular places and times, a quality of universality throughout. The boundaries of geography and culture are permeable in the stories, and I also tried to show the interconnectivity of my characters’ histories. This reflects the world we live in now, where cultural crossover is ever more common and visible.

Noor Naga, nominated for “If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English”

CP: What piece of pop culture has had the biggest impact on your approach to writing? Where might readers be able to see that influence in your work?

Naga: Stylistically this novel was influenced by Michael Ondaatje’s “Coming through Slaughter“ and Sofia Samatar’s short story collection ”Tender“ (in particular “An Account of the Land of Witches”). Content-wise, I’m indebted to J. M. Coetzee’s ”Diary of a Bad Year,“ and of course Tayeb Salih’s “Season of Migration to the North,“ without which this novel could not exist.

I am forever returning to Salih’s portrait of Mustafa Sa’eed as an Afro-Arab who deliberately Orientalizes himself in order to take advantage of English women, not out of racial revenge or some lofty anti-colonial crusade, but out of ambivalence so extreme that it borders on the sociopathic. [This refers to Edward Said’s concept of “Orientalism,” which examines how the western world perceives, distorts and romanticizes eastern cultures.] He is an individual first and foremost, who cannot be reduced to simply a product of race or empire. You cannot understand Mustafa Sa’eed without extending to him the same rigour of psychoanalysis that you would to any western character. He is much too idiosyncratic. I have always tried to extend to my own characters the same space for contradiction and whimsicality that Salih gives Sa’eed.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 4, 2022.

SHARE: