Each winner of the 1985 Governor General's Awards for Literary Merit was selected by a panel of judges administered by the Canada Council for the Arts.
English
{|class="wikitable" width="100%"
!width=15%|Category
!width=30%|Winner
!width=55%|Nominated
|-
| align="center"| Fiction
| Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
|
- Sharon Butala, Queen of the Headaches
- Keath Fraser, Foreign Affairs
- David Adams Richards, Road to the Stilt House
|-
| align="center"| Non-fiction
| Ramsay Cook, The Regenerators: Social Criticism in Late Victorian English Canada