Vancouver's Dorothy Dittrich wins Governor-General's Literary Award for Drama
The Piano Teacher: A Healing Key, which premiered at the Arts Club in 2017, takes national prize
Caitriona Murphy and Megan Leitch in 2017’s production of The Piano Teacher by the Arts Club Theatre. Photo by David Cooper
Dorothy Dittrich
VANCOUVER WRITER DOROTHY Dittrich has just received a Governor-General’s Literary Award for the play The Piano Teacher: A Healing Key, published by Talonbooks.
The play was originally written as a Silver Commission for the Arts Club Theatre in 2016. The story of grief and healing premiered at the Arts Club’s Goldcorp Stage Alley in 2017.
In the work, Erin is a concert pianist whose career has been interrupted so much by the trauma of losing her husband that she hasn’t touched a piano in two years. Then she meets Elaine, a teacher who gently reacquaints her with her instrument—leading Erin to make changes in her life.
The peer assessment committee who chose the work as the winner said: “Moving and compelling. With this gorgeously written play, Dittrich has accomplished the remarkable. She brilliantly delves into a multi-layered exploration of love, loss, isolation and friendship, reaching beyond words to reveal the healing and redemptive power of music. She holds our hand on an unexpected journey through grief towards hope.”
Dittrich is a musician, playwright and sound designer, well-known for working as a vocal coach and musical director on Vancouver’s theatre scene. Her other plays include The Dissociates, Lesser Demons, Two Part Invention and If the Moon Fall, and she created the musical When We Were Singing.
Each writer, translator, or illustrator whose book is selected as a G-G prize winner receives a $25,000 prize. Publishers receive $3,000 to promote the winning book; finalists receive $1,000 each.
Of this year’s winners, Simon Brault, director and CEO of the Canada Council for the Arts said in the announcement today: “It is clear that our world is undergoing an accelerated transformation. We are living in a turbulent social climate, marked by struggles against inequalities. We are confronted daily with many complex phenomena that are more worrisome than ever, including misogyny, gender-based violence, colonialism, racism, the search for identity, and mental health. These are but some of the contemporary themes that are explored by these brilliant GGBooks winners.”
Some of the top winners were:
Fiction: Pure Colour, Sheila Heti (Toronto, Ontario), Penguin Random House Canada;
Poetry: Shadow Blight, Annick MacAskill (Halifax, Nova Scotia), Gaspereau Press;
Nonfiction: Aki-Wayn-Zih: A Person as Worthy as the Earth, Eli Baxter (London, Ontario), McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Find all the winners here.
The 14 best books published in Canada in 2022 were selected by peer assessment committees from among the 70 finalists in seven categories, in both English and French.
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