Sadly. this decade marked a time when in Canadian Fiction the Old Guard was dying off. Margaret Laurence died in 1987 and the 1990's saw us lose people named Callaghan, Mitchell and Davies. But names from a new diverse Canada were emerging, like Sri Lanka's Michael Ondaatje, or Mumbai's Rohinton Mistry (or even Chicago's Carol Shields, our first Canadian Pulitzer Prize winner, matching Ondaatje's achievement as the first Canadian to win the Booker Prize). Pierre Trudeau's Memoirs became one of the greatest Canadian best-sellers ever, to my delight. And New Brunswick's Antonine Maillet won the Prix Goncourt for Pelagie La Charrette modelling her Acadian heroine on the singer Edith Butler.