Canada’s glittery season of literary prizes wrapped up this week with the Governor General’s Awards on the heels of the Writers’ Trust and Giller celebrations. Canadian authors will now put their gowns and suits back in their cupboards and turn to the less glamorous act of writing.

In accepting the $25,000 Writers’ Trust Engel/Findley Prize for his body of work last week, Nino Ricci, award-winning author of Lives of the Saints and The Origin of Species, provided some insight into that life. We’ve excerpted his speech here:

The thanks wouldn’t be complete without including the writers for whom this prize has been named, Marian Engel and Timothy Findley. I never had the honour of knowing Marian Engel personally, but I have known her through her writing and through her prominent place as a groundbreaker in Canadian literature. I did, however, know Timothy Findley, and it gives me particular pleasure to receive a prize that bears his name.

Timothy Findley was well known throughout his life for his generous support of young writers. When my own first novel was about to be published, Jan Geddes at Cormorant Books took a chance and sent the manuscript to him.

The quote he provided for the book gave it a tremendous boost not only here in Canada but internationally and, indeed, helped launch my career as a writer.

If I’m now lucky enough to have survived to mid-career, it is partly thanks to the head start I got at the outset through Findley’s support.

There’s a certain nebulousness that attaches to a term like mid-career, and I don’t envy the jury for this prize at having to figure out exactly what it means.

Maybe, like the judge said about pornography, it’s something you can’t define, but you know it when you see it. Next time you’re at a writers’ event, try looking around the room for the writers with a certain unfocused gaze or bad haircut, the ones who have had a few too many or are constantly popping prescription medication — the ones, in other words, who look like they are in need of an intervention — and you are probably looking at a writer in mid-career. I think of mid-career as comparable to being in the middle stage of writing a novel, when you have neither the excitement of the beginning nor the satisfaction of the ending to keep you going and no way of knowing if you are writing a heartbreaking work of staggering genius or a staggering work of heartbreaking inconsequence.

This is also about the time when you face some tough economic choices.

Do you keep accepting every low-paying teaching gig and freelance offer in the hope you can cobble together almost enough to live on while seeing your writing time dwindle away to nothing? Or do you throw caution to the winds and max out your home equity credit line, with the knowledge that the least drop in the housing market or rise in the interest rate will leave you and your family living in your parents’ basement? That is what I suspect mid-career looks like for a lot of writers, too soon for the saving grace of seniors’ benefits but too late to go back and get the degree in accounting your parents always told you to get.

That’s why a prize like this one is so important: it is a way of saying to writers, midway in their journey, when they find themselves in that dark wood, that they are on the right road. I can’t imagine anything more gratifying than to be assured by a jury of my peers, here in front of my parents, no less, that my career choice has not been an entirely misguided one. So even though mid-career prizes tend not to be seen as the sexy prizes, this one feels pretty sexy to me. And let me add that I hope my wife feels the same.

In the best of all possible worlds, of course, all writers would get a prize like this one. One sometimes hears grumbling in the world at large that there are too many literary prizes, but what such grumbling fails to take into account is that other professions have perks writers don’t. They’re called incomes. Writers are now, and mostly always have been, unacknowledged subsidizers, giving up their work at what by any measure is a fraction of its real value simply because they are foolish enough to want to keep doing what they do even when they aren’t adequately compensated for it. I’m very aware then, standing here today, that I am really just a placeholder for the many other writers who could just as easily be here, and that the real purpose of award ceremonies like this one is not so much to honour particular individuals as to raise all boats, and to remind us that literature is still here, alive and kicking, for all the announcements of its impending demise.

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Back in the 1st century the Roman writer Petronius complained that no one was reading the classics anymore, yet 2,000 years further on the classics are still in print. Indeed there are more readers in the world now, both by percentage and in absolute numbers, than has ever been the case in human history, and they are reading work of every sort and of every level of sophistication, with no sign their hunger is set to abate. Whatever rough beast may be slouching toward Bertelsmann to be born, then, and whether it be animal, vegetable, or digital, I think literature as we have known it will still be there at its heart.

Now as ever, literature remains one of the best tools we have for making sense of the world. So my thanks to everyone here, and in particular to all of tonight’s nominees and winners, for helping literature through its own mid-career.