2024 Giller Prize
The winner will be announced on November 18.
2024 Shortlist
The 2024 Giller Prize shortlist was announced on Wednesday, October 9, 2024. The five titles were chosen from a longlist of 12 books announced on September 4, 2024.
Jury Citation: What I Know About You
“One man’s love for another breaches the norms of gender, society and class in the otherwise modernizing, secular Egypt of Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat. Tarek, a doctor, nurtures a love that comes to him unexpectedly and neither his country, nor his family is able to accept. Elegantly told and profoundly affecting, What I Know About You speaks to the inherited moral structures constraining us, and to the alienation of a man’s inner life rendered external. Tarek leaves Cairo and his marriage for Montreal, a cold and foreign city in which his otherness is of a more ordinary kind but, when circumstances finally permit, returns to confront the past and its consequences nebulously in pursuit of him. Here is a quiet, touching story in which the acts of yearning, stymied hearts transcend their troubled genesis and move their hosts towards the possibility of redemption that is love’s essence.”
What I Know About You by Éric Chacour
Jury Citation: Curiosities
“Anne Fleming’s Curiosities begins in 17th century England beset by the plague and rife with superstition and fear. A series of archived memoirs that the amateur historian Anne is researching provide a puzzle and the means by which this thrillingly inventive novel immerses us in the historic and illuminates the contemporary. Joan, the only one of her family to survive “the sicknesse,” takes up with another child, Thomasina, alone and nursed by a goat. They find allies where they can, notably “Old Nut,” an ostracized woman who is imprisoned, tried and executed because she is thought to be a witch, as Joan is later assumed to be, before their paths, perilous and radically different, diverge. “Tom,” disguised as a boy, joins the crew of a ship sailing through Hudson’s Bay, while Lady Margaret Long, a naturalist and thoroughly modern woman, takes Joan underwing. Singular and surprising, Curiosities is a captivating story of hope, change, and belonging, and first and foremost a testament to varieties of love that endure beyond any one history or era.”
Curiosities by Anne Fleming
Jury Citation: Prairie Edge
“Conor Kerr’s Prairie Edge is both a propulsive crime narrative built around successive, compounding blunders and a work of literary art that tells us about what it means to live in a world where action and rhetoric around decolonization fail to align. Its two main characters, an idealistic, would-be academic and an endearingly naive ex-con, both Métis, hatch a quixotic plan to re-home bison from national parks to downtown Edmonton, where they once ran free, as a bold statement against the settler status quo. Kerr extracts maximum amounts of comedy and pathos from the novel’s premise while populating this fictional world with resonant characters whose difficult experiences with group homes, social services, and activist circles are softened by enduring family bonds and friendships. Kerr entertains us with a contemporary caper while inviting readers to consider a future that has reckoned with the past.”
Prairie Edge by Conor Kerr
Jury Citaion: Held
“Anne Michaels’ Held is a novel that floats, a beguiling association of memories, projections, and haunted instances through which the very notion of our mortality, of our resilience and desires, is interrogated in passages as impactful as they can be hypnotic. Ostensibly Held begins with a man, John, lying injured on a First World War battlefield who returns, broken, to the woman he loves and his Yorkshire photography studio, where ghostly figures emerge from the shadows of the photographs he develops—the sorts of “images that can, like certain rhythms, dismantle us.” In a story of querulous fragments refuting a novel’s usual form, Michaels conveys war’s legacy of harm and trauma reverberating across generations, but through them all our irrefutable connectedness. Michaels’ mastery of word and situations is understated but insistent, an altogether successful reliance that deflects attention from its author and embeds the reader in the resoundingly mysterious and ephemeral. Here is a novel in which we are willingly held.”
Held by Anne Michaels
Jury Citation: Peacocks of Instagram
“An utterly absorbing, often hilarious story collection, Deepa Rajagopalan’s Peacocks of Instagram reimagines the literature of the Indian diaspora in the age of globe-trotting IT workers, climate change, and social media influencers. A divorced woman channels her grief over the demise of her marriage into a bestselling line of ceramics. A factory owner in Johannesburg learns about the “secret” life led by his sometimes girlfriend in Toronto at her funeral. A young woman takes revenge on her oil lobbyist foster dad. Written in mature, perfectly rounded prose embroidered with telling detail and pithy dialogue, the loosely linked stories of this arresting debut collection follow an array of appealing characters who not only withstand heartbreak and misunderstanding but occasionally triumph over it by dint of their wit and cunning. In their discovery of themselves and their capabilities, Rajagopalan’s stories continually surprise.”
Peacocks of Instagram by Deepa Rajagopalan
2024 Longlist
The 2024 Giller Prize jury announced its longlist on Wednesday, September 4, 2024.
The 12 titles were chosen from a field of 112 books submitted by publishers all across Canada.
A Way to be Happy by Caroline Adderson
Caroline Adderson is the author of five novels (A History of Forgetting, Sitting Practice, The Sky Is Falling, Ellen in Pieces, A Russian Sister), two collections of short stories (Bad Imaginings, Pleased to Meet You) as well as many books for young readers. She is also the editor and co-contributor of a non-fiction book of essays and photographs, Vancouver Vanishes: Narratives of Demolition and Revival and guest editor of Best Canadian Stories 2019. Her work has received numerous award nominations including the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, two Commonwealth Writers’ Prizes, the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Rogers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist. In 2017, she was a YWCA Women of Distinction Award for Arts, Culture and Design nominee. Her awards include three BC Book Prizes, three CBC Literary Awards, the Marian Engel Award for mid-career achievement, and a National Magazine Award Gold Medal for Fiction. She teaches in the Writing and Publishing Program at SFU and is the Program Director of the Writing Studio at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.
Death by a Thousand Cuts by Shashi Bhat
SHASHI BHAT is the author of the novels The Family Took Shape, a finalist for the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award, and, most recently, The Most Precious Substance on Earth, a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for fiction. Death by a Thousand Cuts is her first book of short fiction. Her stories have won the Writers’ Trust/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize and been shortlisted for a National Magazine Award and the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, and appeared in such publications as Hazlitt, The Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, Best Canadian Stories, and The Journey Prize Stories. Shashi holds an MFA from the Johns Hopkins University and a BA from Cornell University. She lives in New Westminster, B.C., where she is the editor-in-chief of EVENT magazine and teaches creative writing at Douglas College.
Website: shashibhat.com
Twitter: @ShashiSBhat
Instagram: @ssb1983
What I Know About You by Éric Chacour
Born in Montreal to Egyptian parents, Éric Chacour has shared his life between France and Quebec. A graduate in applied economics and international relations, he now works in the financial sector. What I Know About You is his first novel.
Bad Land by Corinna Chong
Corinna Chong is the author of two novels, Belinda’s Rings (NeWest Press, 2013) and Bad Land (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2024), as well as the story collection The Whole Animal (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2023). Her reviews and short fiction have appeared in magazines across Canada, including Grain, Room, PRISM international, and The Fiddlehead. Corinna lives in Kelowna, BC and teaches English, creative writing, and fine arts at Okanagan College.
Website: corinnachong.com
Facebook: corinnachong.author
X/Twitter: @corinnaschong
Instagram: @corinnaschong
Curiosities by Anne Fleming
Anne Fleming is the author of Pool-Hopping and Other Stories, shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize; and the novel Anomaly, published to widespread acclaim. Her middle-grade novel, The Goat, was a Junior Library Guild and White Ravens selection, shortlisted for Italy’s Premio Strega, optioned for film, and named one of the Top Ten Children’s Books of the Year by the New York Public Library and The Wall Street Journal. Anne Fleming lives in Victoria, British Columbia.
Website: www.annefleming.ca
Twitter: @anne_flem
Prairie Edge by Conor Kerr
CONOR KERR is a Métis/Ukrainian writer living in Edmonton. A member of the Métis Nation of Alberta, he is descended from the Lac Ste. Anne Métis and the Papaschase Cree Nation. His Ukrainian family are settlers in Treaty 4 and 6 territories in Saskatchewan. He grew up in Saskatoon, Edmonton, and other prairie towns and cities. In 2022, he was named one of CBC’s Writers to Watch. He is the author of the poetry collections An Explosion of Feathers and Old Gods, as well as the novel Avenue of Champions, which was shortlisted for the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, longlisted for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize, and won the 2022 ReLIT award. Conor is an Assistant Professor at the University of Alberta, where he teaches creative writing.
Instagram: @millcreekcowboy
This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud
Claire Messud is the author of six works of fiction. A recipient of Guggenheim and Radcliffe fellowships and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she teaches at Harvard University and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Website: clairemessud.com
Instagram: @clairemessud
Facebook: Claire Messud
Held by Anne Michaels
ANNE MICHAELS’s books have been translated into more than forty-five languages and have won dozens of international awards, including the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Guardian Fiction Prize, and the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction. She has been short-listed for the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, twice short-listed for the Giller Prize, and twice long-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Her novel Fugitive Pieces was adapted into a feature film. From 2015 to 2019, she was Toronto’s poet laureate. She lives in Canada.
Website: www.annemichaels.ca
Twitter: @annemichaels_
The Cure for Drowning by Lohan Paylor
Website: oghanpaylor.com
Twitter/X: @LoghanPaylor
Instagram: @loghanish
Peacocks of Instagram by Deepa Rajagopalan
DEEPA RAJAGOPALAN won the 2021 RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award. Her work has appeared in literary magazines and anthologies such as the Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology, the New Quarterly, Room, the Malahat Review, Event, and Arc. She has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Guelph. Born to Indian parents in Saudi Arabia, she has lived in many cities across India, the US, and Canada. Deepa works in the tech industry in Toronto.
In Winter I Get up at Night by Jane Urquhart
JANE URQUHART, one of Canada’s best loved writers, was born in the north (in Little Longlac, Ontario), and grew up in Northumberland County and Toronto. She is the author of eight internationally acclaimed novels, which have received Le prix du meilleur livre étranger (Best Foreign Book Award) in France; the Trillium Award; and the Governor General’s Award, and have been finalists or longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; the Rogers Communications Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize; the Orange Prize; The Giller Prize; the Booker Prize; and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book, among others.
real ones by katherena vermette
katherena vermette (she/her) is a Michif (Red River Métis) writer from Treaty 1 territory, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. Born in Winnipeg, her Michif roots on her paternal side run deep in St. Boniface, St. Norbert and beyond. Her maternal side is Mennonite from the Altona and Rosenfeld area (Treaty 1). Her first book, North End Love Songs (Muses’ Company), won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry. Her novels The Break (House of Anansi), The Strangers and The Circle (Hamish Hamilton) were all national bestsellers and won multiple literary awards. Her work for children and young adults includes a picture book, The Girl and the Wolf (Theytus), and graphic novels, A Girl Called Echo, Vol. 1–4 (Highwater)—a special omnibus edition of the series was released in Fall 2023. She holds a Master of Fine Arts from the University of British Columbia and an honourary Doctor of Letters from the University of Manitoba. katherena lives with her kids—fur and human—in a cranky old house within skipping distance of the temperamental Red River.
Website: www.katherenavermette.com
Of the 2024 longlist, the jury writes:
Writers of fiction imagine, as a matter of course, what it means to be another: to be marginalized, to be suppressed, to be guilty—to be joyful!—or simply not seen. Their words sing lives, extol our virtues, nurse our injuries, expose our faults, and compel us to consider worlds about which we are curious and unknowing or had no idea existed. It is the profound belief in our common humanity writers share that makes this possible, a conviction never more important than in fractious times such as we are living today, and brilliantly on display in the concerns and stories of these twelve exceptional Canadian authors. The worlds they thrillingly put within readers’ reach scan centuries, cultures, divides; they are sometimes beautiful and sometimes traumatic, but always richly conveyed and ardently felt.
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