Ricci, who studied English at York, beat fellow contenders David Adams Richards (The Lost Highway), Rawi Hage (Cockroach), Fred Stenson (The Great Karoo) and Rivka Galchen (Atmospheric Disturbances) for the $25,000 Governor General’s Literary Award. The Origin of Species was also long-listed for this year’s Scotiabank Giller Prize, won by another York alumnus, Joseph Boyden (see YFile, Nov. 13).

“It’s a big boost to my writing career,” says Ricci. “This will allow me to keep on writing and writing what I want.”

Ricci says there’s a push towards discovering young, sexy writers and less fuss paid to mid-career writers. “It’s become a real struggle getting through that without falling off the map. There’s less and less space for people who are not the big sellers. There’s a lot more pressure for every book to be a big book.”

This is the second time Ricci has won the prestigious Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction. His first win was in 1990 for his debut novel, Lives of the Saints, which later became part of a trilogy. He credits his time at York as a major influence on his career.

“I had some life-changing profs at York. Probably half the courses I took there had profs who were quite seminal to me,” he says.

Despite winning two Governor General’s Literary Awards, and many more honours, self-doubt remains Ricci’s constant demon. “Am I on the right track? When it takes four to five years to do a project and you’ve already been doing it for three years without any outside confirmation that what you’re doing has any value, that’s difficult,” he says. “The big demon is always doubt. There’s always the possibility that I’ve gone off in the wrong direction or lost my touch. When I finish a project, I right away put my emotional eggs in the next basket. So if one doesn’t do well, I’ve got the next one. I’d be quite terrified if I’d finished one project and didn’t have anything else ahead.”

At York, Ricci encountered the iconic Canadian writer W.O. Mitchell, who tested his determination. “I was told by him I didn’t have what it takes to be a writer. It could have been quite devastating. Fortunately, I really had no other life plan and I had to make it work. It gave me something to fight against, something to prove. So in some ways I’m quite indebted to him.” (See YorkU, Summer 2004, "Big Ideas" and "The Lifetime Reading Plan".)

Ricci puts his latest win down to happenstance. “There’s a large amount of chance and luck – who is on the jury or what the zeitgeist is at that moment,” he says. It’s not that he doesn’t appreciate the award. He does. “It’s cherished,” he says. This second win even more than the first as he now grasps the importance of it. Still, he says, “they’re a bit of a lottery these things.”

This year’s English fiction jury members had this to say about The Origin of Species: “[It] is written with great humanity, realism and wit. Told in windowpane prose, this story reads as if it has come up through our collective memory. With the shock of recognition, we gain a new understanding of our fragility and our strength.”

Set in 1980s Montreal against a backdrop of Brian Mulroney leading Canada, Margaret Thatcher in England and Ronald Reagan in the US, the novel follows the travails of Alex Fratarcangeli, a 30-something graduate student, as he explores his tattered life with the help of a psychoanalyst. Alex faces his demons – guilt over former relationships, a desire for love and, at the same time, unencumbered sex. A disastrous trip to the Galapagos Islands figures prominently in his psyche and is only now slowly unravelling truths he failed to recognize earlier. Throughout, Alex continues to struggle with his dissertation on Darwin’s theory of evolution and to grapple with emotions he now feels are obsolete, evolutionary leftovers. In the midst of this he meets characters who embrace life despite great physical and mental hardships and gradually he begins to discover life isn’t as meaningless as he once thought.

“In this book there are a lot of things that have an autobiographical base, but they are twisted and changed,” Ricci says. “I had some fun with that – what is fact and what is fiction.”

Ricci was born in Leamington, Ont. to Italian immigrants. He is a multi-award-winning author of five books of fiction, many of them mining the Italian-Canadian immigrant experience. “I’ll mine anything. I’m not picky about what I mine – other people’s experiences…anecdotes I’ve heard in bars – however it comes to me,” says Ricci.

After completing his degree at York, Ricci went on to study creative writing at Concordia University, and later took up Italian studies at the University of Florence, Italy. He was also a writer-in-residence under the auspices of the Mariano A. Elia Chair in Italian-Canadian Studies at York in 2000. In 2006, Ricci won the inaugural Alistair MacLeod Award for Literary Achievement. The past president of PEN Canada, he now writes at his Toronto home where he lives with his wife, fellow writer Erika de Vasconcelos.

Ricci is currently at work on his next book, a non-fiction piece about Pierre Trudeau, due out in 2009. It is part of the Penguin series Extraordinary Canadians edited by John Ralston Saul.

The Governor General’s Literary Awards will be presented on Dec. 10 at Rideau Hall in Ottawa by the Governor General of Canada, Michaëlle Jean.

Media contact:
Melissa Hughes, Media Relations, York University: 416 736 2100 x22097, mehughes@yorku.ca

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