It was a great pleasure to have His Whole Life on the shortlist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, 2015.
The jury’s citation reads: Set on the cusp of personal and national change, His Whole Life is a resonant and penetrating novel that explores the complex evolution of love and affection through a rich array of relationships. At this story’s centre are a mother and son so richly realized their delights, pleasures, and aches become the reader’s. Elizabeth Hay deftly – in elegant and luminous prose – explores how life can betray us or bring us to the surface, and all the subtle ways that one human being can fail, or serve, another.
The jurors were Aislin Hunter, Shani Mootoo, and Richard Wagamese.