Awards & Winners

Gwethalyn Graham

Date of Birth 18-January-1913
Place of Birth Toronto
(Ontario, Canada)
Nationality Canada
Profession Novelist
Gwethalyn Graham was a Canadian writer, whose 1944 novel Earth and High Heaven was the first Canadian book to reach number one on the New York Times Best Seller list. Graham won the Governor General's Award twice, for her first novel Swiss Sonata in 1938, and for Earth and High Heaven in 1944. She was born Gwethalyn Graham Erichsen-Brown, to wealthy Toronto parents. Her father was a lawyer. At 19, she was a student at Smith College in Massachusetts, but dropped out and eloped with John McNaught, the son of her father's business partner. They later divorced, and Graham moved to the city of Westmount, on the Island of Montreal where she became a close friend and associate of Hugh MacLennan, F. R. Scott, Thérèse Casgrain and Pierre Trudeau. Graham subsequently married David Yalden-Thomson, a philosophy professor at McGill University; they subsequently also divorced. Graham was also an outspoken activist against anti-Semitism and anti-French Canadian discrimination; Earth and High Heaven depicted an interfaith romance between a Protestant woman from Montreal and a Jewish man from Northern Ontario. The novel was optioned by Samuel Goldwyn for a film that was to star Katharine Hepburn; however, the film was never made.

Awards by Gwethalyn Graham

Check all the awards nominated and won by Gwethalyn Graham.

1945


Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards
Honored for : Earth and High Heaven

1944


Governor General's Award for English-language fiction
Honored for : Earth and High Heaven

Nominations 1944 »

Award Nominated Nominated Work
Governor General's Award for English-language fiction Earth and High Heaven

1938


Governor General's Award for English-language fiction
Honored for : Swiss Sonata

Nominations 1938 »

Award Nominated Nominated Work
Governor General's Award for English-language fiction Swiss Sonata