NOW's most-read Book articles of 2011.

Half-blood Blues, Esi Edugyan's story of black jazz musicians surviving the Nazi occupation in Paris, took the Giller Prize last night at last night's fancy pants gala at the Four Seasons Hotel.

One of the more surprising things Joan Didion told the full house in the Brigantine Room at Harbourfront Centre on the final night of the International Festival of Authors is that she begins an average writing day in the morning in her office, breaks for lunch, continues to work till 7 or 7:30 pm and then relocates to her living room with a drink and a red pen with which to mark up the newly finished pages. 

When I point my camera at Writers Trust fiction prize winner Patrick deWitt just after he got word that he'd walked off with $25,000 for The Sisters Brothers, I beg him to smile.

Harbourfront Centre was abuzz with lit love on Sunday, the final day of the International Festival of Authors (although the great Joan Didion appears November 8, an event that also falls under the IFOA umbrella).