Olivier Choinière, author of Félicité (Bliss, in the English translation by Caryl Churchill), has won the Siminovitch Prize, given to a stage artist in mid-career.
You’ve probably never heard of Choinière, who is now $75,000 richer – the winner gives one quarter of the $100,000 purse to a mentee, in this case Annick Lefebvre.
But I bet you’ve heard of just about everyone who’s won the Giller Prize for Canadian fiction. I know, 2010 winner Johanna Skibsrud or 2011 winner Esi Edugyan weren’t exactly household names when they hit the podium (though Edugyan had been on NOW’s cover), but once they won the award, their books blew up big-time.
Maybe that’s the difficulty of a theatre prize. This one, founded by Lou Siminovitch to honour his playwright wife, Elinore, is given annually cycling between playwright, director and designer to honour an artist in mid-career.
It’s one of the biggest awards for an artist in the entire country. (At the October 20 gala at Hart House, I was kidding Jack Rabinovitch, founder of the Giller Prize honouring his wife Doris Giller, about that last night. “Wow, $100, 000,” I said to the man who just upped his prize’s purse to $100,000, $60,00 for the winner and $10,000 for each shortlisted author. “What are you going to do about that?” He smiled and said, “It’s not a competition.”)
But unlike the Giller or an Oscar or even a Canadian film award, you can’t snap up a book or a movie ticket. A Montreal-based winner of the Siminovitch prize doesn’t inspire us to head to Quebec the next time he mounts one of his plays, even though it’s obvious, based on Toronto’s packed houses, that audiences here appreciate the power of theatre.
That’s actually one of the things I love about the Siminovitch Prize. It’s not a marketer’s dream. Though some of the nominees – who alongside Choinière included Colleen Murphy, Hannah Moscovitch and Michel Marc Bouchard – had their agents at the ready during the awards presentation, there weren’t publicists clamouringfor the opportunity to sell the winner’s next product.
The Siminovitch Prize doesn’t pride itself first and foremost on having a commercial impact, like the so-called Giller effect. It simply honours a great artist and urges him or her to create more.
Choinière’s acceptance speech – about how the prize, among other things, gives him the freedom not to think first about marketing but about the art – was perfect for the occasion.
