Introducing the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize Jury

January 9, 2016

Elana Rabinovitch, Executive Director of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, today announced the five member jury panel for the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize.

The 2016 jury members are:

Canadian writers Lawrence Hill (Jury Chair), Jeet Heer and Kathleen Winter, along with British author Samantha Harvey and Scottish writer Alan Warner.

Some background on the 2016 jury:

Samantha Harvey is the author of three novels, The Wilderness, All Is Song and most recently, Dear Thief, published in 2014. Dear Thief was longlisted for the BAILEYS Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2015 James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Her previous novels have been nominated for various awards, among them the Guardian First Book Award, the Orange Prize and the Man Booker Prize. She has also published and broadcast her short stories. She lives in Bath, U.K., and teaches creative writing at Bath Spa University

Jeet Heer is a senior editor at The New Republic and has published in a wide array of journals including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Virginia Quarterly Review. He is the author of two books, In Love With Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman and Sweet Lechery: Essays, Profiles and Review. With Kent Worcester, Heer co-edited A Comics Studies Reader, which won the Peter C. Rollins Book Award. He’s been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship. With the cartoonist Chris Ware, Heer continues to edit the Walt and Skeezix series from Drawn and Quarterly, which is now entering its 6th volume. Heer divides his time between Toronto and Regina.

Lawrence Hill is the author of ten books, including The Illegal and The Book of Negroes, winner of various awards including The Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and CBC Radio’s Canada Reads. Hill delivered the 2013 Massey Lectures, based on his non-fiction book Blood: The Stuff of Life. He co-wrote the adaptation for the six-part television miniseries The Book of Negroes, and is currently writing a new novel, as well as a screenplay adaptation of The Illegal. He lives with his family in Hamilton, Ontario and in Woody Point, Newfoundland.

Alan Warner was born in Oban, Scotland, and is the author of eight novels: Morvern Callar, These Demented Lands, The Sopranos, The Man Who Walks, The Worms Can Carry Me To Heaven, The Stars in the Bright Sky, which was longlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize, and The Deadman’s Pedal, which won the 2013 James Tait Black Prize. His most recent novel, Their Lips Talk of Mischief, was published in 2014. Warner lives in Edinburgh.

Kathleen Winter is the author of the bestseller, Annabel, published in 2011, finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Orange Prize for Fiction, and CBC’s Canada Reads. Annabel has been translated worldwide. Winter’s story collection boYs edited by John Metcalf won numerous awards. Her Arctic memoir Boundless (2014) was shortlisted for Canada’s Weston and Taylor non-fiction prizes and has been sold internationally. The Freedom in American Songs also came out in 2014. Born in the U.K., Winter lives in Montreal after spending many years in Newfoundland.

This year marks the 23rd anniversary of the Scotiabank Giller Prize.

Hi-res images of the 2016 jurors are available for download on the Media Resources page at www.scotiabankgillerprize.ca.

Rakuten Kobo has generously donated a Kobo Glo HD eReader to each member of the 2016 jury panel. The Scotiabank Giller Prize encourages publishers to provide digital copies of its submitted titles in addition to print books.

The Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist will be announced on September 6, 2016. This year’s shortlist will be announced at a press event in Toronto on September 26. The winner will be named at a black-tie dinner and awards ceremony at Toronto’s Ritz-Carlton on Monday, November 7, 2016. [updated after the issue of this press release]

The 2016 submission package, including updated rules and details, can be found at scotiabankgillerprize.ca/submissions

About the Prize

The Scotiabank Giller Prize strives to highlight the very best in Canadian fiction year after year. The prize awards $100,000 annually to the author of the best Canadian novel or short story collection published in English, and $10,000 to each of the finalists. The award is named in honour of the late literary journalist Doris Giller and was founded in 1994 by her husband, Toronto businessman Jack Rabinovitch.

About Scotiabank

Through our global community investment strategy, Scotiabank and its employees support causes at a grassroots level. Recognized as a leader for our charitable donations and philanthropic activities, in 2015, Scotiabank contributed $67 million to help our communities around the world.

Scotiabank is Canada’s international bank and a leading financial services provider in North America, Latin America, the Caribbean and Central America, and parts of Asia. We are dedicated to helping our 23 million customers become better off through a broad range of advice, products and services, including personal and commercial banking, wealth management and private banking, corporate and investment banking, and capital markets. With a team of approximately 90,000 employees and assets of $856 billion (as at October 31, 2015), Scotiabank trades on the Toronto (TSX: BNS) and New York Exchanges (NYSE: BNS). Scotiabank distributes the Bank’s media releases using Marketwired. For more information, please visit www.scotiabank.com and follow us on Twitter @ScotiabankNews.

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Media Enquiries

Elana Rabinovitch
Executive Director
Scotiabank Giller Prize
(416) 275 5418
elana@gillerprize.ca

Kristin McCleister
Public, Corporate and Government Affairs
Scotiabank
(416) 933-0646
Kristin.Mccleister@scotiabank.com