Each winner of the 1981 Governor General's Awards for Literary Merit was selected by a panel of judges administered by the Canada Council for the Arts.
The 1981 awards were the first time that separate awards were presented for poetry and drama, which had previously competed in a single "poetry or drama" category.
| Category | Winner | Nominated |
|---|---|---|
| Fiction |  Mavis Gallant, Home Truths: Selected Canadian Stories | No advance shortlist was released for this category. [1] |
| Non-fiction | George Calef, Caribou and the Barren-Lands |
|
| Poetry | F. R. Scott, The Collected Poems of F. R. Scott |
|
| Drama | Sharon Pollock, Blood Relations |
|
| Category | Winner | Nominated |
|---|---|---|
| Fiction | Denys Chabot, La province lunaire |
|
| Non-fiction | Madeleine Ouellette-Michalska, L'échappée des discours de l'oeil |
|
| Poetry | Michel Beaulieu, Visages | No advance shortlist was released for this category. |
| Drama | Marie Laberge, C'était avant la guerre à l'anse à Gilles |
|
Sir Derek Alton Walcott OM was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros (1990), which many critics view "as Walcott's major achievement." In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, Walcott received many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the 2010 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry White Egrets and the Griffin Trust For Excellence in Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015.
The Hopwood Awards are a major scholarship program at the University of Michigan, founded by Avery Hopwood.
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Canadian poetry is poetry of or typical of Canada. The term encompasses poetry written in Canada or by Canadian people in the official languages of English and French, and an increasingly prominent body of work in both other European and Indigenous languages.
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The Governor General's Award for French-language poetry or drama was a Canadian literary award that annually recognized one Canadian writer for a work of poetry or drama published in French. It was one of the Governor General's Awards for Literary Merit from 1959 to 1980, after which it was divided into the award for French-language poetry and award for French-language drama. The Governor General's Awards program is administered by the Canada Council for the Arts.
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