Good Score! Joseph Boyden (wiki), author of Three Day Road, has won the $50,000 Giller prize for his newest novel, Through Black Spruce. Via CTV News:

Competing against Boyden were Rawi Hage for “Cockroach,” Mary Swan for “The Boys in the Trees,” Anthony De Sa for “Barnacle Love” and Marina Endicott for “Good to a Fault.”

But Boyden’s poetic portrait of contemporary aboriginal life and that culture’s urban-rural divide most impressed this year’s judging panel.

“We always hear about the diabetes and the suicide rates among Canada’s Native peoples. But there is such a beauty in them – and in the land. I wanted to get that across to people in this book,” Boyden told CTV.ca.

As Annie, one of the book’s characters points out, the Cree inhabitants living within Boyden’s fictional book have “gone from living on the land … hunting, trapping, trading in order to survive, to living in clapboard houses and pushing squeaky grocery carts up and down aisles filled with overpriced and unhealthy food.” They have, as Annie ironically puts it, become “civilized.”

“I am very happy to speak for a people in my own way who often don’t have their own voice,” Boyden told O’Regan.

More on the Giller Prize here.