On April 23, World Book Day will be celebrated in Canada, and in observation of the day, OntarioBets.com took a breather from Ontario sports betting to take a look at Canada’s best authors. Determining the best authors is a very subjective task, with people’s tastes, styles and personal preferences needing to be taken into account and no list will ever make anyone happy.
In attempting to formulate this list, OntarioBets.com utilized BookNet Canada’s 150 Bestselling Books by Canadian Authors to find the authors with the most bestselling titles. We then combined those rankings with the number of literary awards received by each author to formulate a ranking of the top greats.
We hope you enjoy this breakdown, and remember we are also home to the best Ontario sportsbook apps.
Margaret Atwood and Robert Munsch top the list, though they took exceptionally different routes to get there. Munsch was dominant with volume, as 35 of the top 150 best selling books came from him, dwarfing the second place Atwood, who placed only four. Munsch is a children’s author and his stories are often exuberant, excitable and always unique, never using the same character twice, with each story being its own. Love You Forever is his best-selling book and ranks as a top-five children’s book for all time sales worldwide, not just in Canada.
Atwood was as much, if not more, a poet than a novelist, but still managed to place four books on the top 150 list. Her diversity is unrivaled, as she has written poetry books, novels, non-fiction stories, children’s books and graphic novels. As far as awards go, no Canadian author can touch her, as the list of honors she has received goes on and on, highlighted by the Governer General’s Award, the Trillium Book Award (three times), and the Booker Prize on two occasions. The Handmaid’s Tale is one of her most popular titles, made even more popular in recent years after its television adaptation. Her themes of feminism, speculative fiction and Canadian identity have played big roles in her work and speak to her diversity.
While Munsch and Atwood clearly took the top spots, there have been several other notable Canadian authors including Miriam Toews, Alice Munro, Lawrence Hill, Kelley Armstrong, Joseph Boyden and Chris Hadfield who all appear on the top 150 list with three books each. There is such diversity with all of these authors, from the former astronaut Hadfield who wrote an autobiography in 2015 and has followed it up with fiction novels, to Toews who used inspiration from her Mennonite upbringing in Steinbach, Manitoba to write fiction novels.
With so many different authors providing so much great value, there is no shortage of work to celebrate World Book Day in Canada, and the work of these great authors will surely inspire more great books for generations to come.
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Author
Cecil Peters is a Senior Betting Analyst for OntarioBets.com. A professional sports bettor in Canada, Cecil specializes in analyzing the latest odds impacting professional sports teams in Canada, with a focus on Toronto's favorite players and teams including the Raptors, Blue Jays & Maple Leafs.
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