IN 2009 MY sixth novel, The Mistress of Nothing, a historical fiction set in Egypt in the 1860s, came out to good reviews. It began to do well. It made it onto one very long longlist, then a shorter longlist, and then onto the shortlist of a prize that, confusingly, doesn’t have a longlist. That shortlist, for the Governor General’s Award for English-language Fiction, one of Canada’s major literary honours, also contained a book of short stories by Alice Munro, who was, as Jennifer Lawrence said of Meryl Streep, a GOAT. As well as that, another master of the short story, Alistair MacLeod, one of my all-time favourite writers, was on the jury. There was no chance I would win but knowing that MacLeod had read my book was its own special reward. 

Prior to that, I’d managed to sustain a twenty-year career writing fiction without ever wasting a single moment pondering the winning – and the much more common not-winning – of prizes. The prize cycle, with its longlists and shortlists, its outrages and debates, was not on my radar. I thought, Oh, that happens over there; it doesn’t concern me. This seems odd now, living as I do in London, the city where literary hype and scandal originated (at least in the English language; I’m sure there’s been plenty of bitchiness elsewhere in the world over the centuries). Margaret Atwood once told me that she liked coming to London because the gossip and malice is better here than elsewhere. Like Atwood – and Munro – I’m Canadian (this is where the comparisons stop), though I’ve lived in London the whole of my adult life. But I’m an immigrant here, a foreigner as the current government likes to call us, which means that I’m an outsider, and this is part of what enables me to think, Oh, that doesn’t apply to me.