Giller Power Panel: The End is Nigh – Apocalyptic Canadian Fiction

Omar El Akkad is an author and journalist. He was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, moved to Canada as a teenager and now lives in the United States. The start of his journalism career coincided with the start of the war on terror, and over the following decade he reported from Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and many other locations around the world. His work earned a National Newspaper Award for Investigative Journalism and the Goff Penny Award for young journalists. His fiction and non-fiction writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Guernica, GQ and many other newspapers and magazines. His debut novel, American War, is an international bestseller and has been translated into thirteen languages. It won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award, the Oregon Book Award for fiction, the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize and has been nominated for more than ten other awards. It was listed as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, Washington Post, GQ, NPR, Esquire and was selected by the BBC as one of 100 novels that changed our world. His new novel, What Strange Paradise, was released in July, 2021 and won the Giller Prize, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award, the Oregon Book Award for fiction, and was shortlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize. It was also named a best book of the year by the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR and several other publications.

Larissa Lai is the author of nine books including the novels The Tiger Flu, Salt Fish Girl, and most recently The Lost Century. Recipient of the Jim Duggins Novelist’s Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, the Astraea Award, and the Otherwise Honor Book and twice finalist for the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Award, she has also been a finalist for the Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Lambda Award, the Sunburst Award , the bpNichol Chapbook Award, the Dorothy Livesay Prize, the ACQL Gabrielle Roy Prize for Literary Criticism and a Governor General’s award for the French translation of Salt Fish Girl, entitled Le Fruit de la Puanteur. She is currently a Maria Zambrano Fellow at the University of Huelva in Spain, and a Canada Research Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Calgary.

Thea Lim is the author of An Ocean of Minutes, which was a shortlisted finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, translated into three languages, and optioned for television. Her short-form fiction and culture writing has been published in Granta, The Nation, The Paris Review, Best Canadian Stories, The Guardian, The Globe and Mail, Guernica, and others. She’s been proud to serve on several prize juries, including the 2022 Governor-General’s Fiction Prize. This year she is the Barker Fairley Distinguished Visitor at the University of Toronto, and a 2023 writer-in-residence at the Toronto Public Library. She grew up in Singapore and now lives with her family in Toronto.

Saleema Nawaz‘s most recent novel is Songs for the End of the World, which was an instant national bestseller. She is also the author of the novel Bone and Bread (a finalist for Canada Reads and winner of the Quebec Writers’ Federation Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction), the short-story collection Mother Superior, and she is a winner of the Writers’ Trust of Canada/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize. A former columnist at the Montreal Gazette, Saleema is currently writing a musical and working in a TV writers’ room.

Waubgeshig Rice is an author and journalist from Wasauksing First Nation. He has written three fiction titles, and his short stories and essays have been published in numerous anthologies. His most recent novel, Moon of the Crusted Snow, was published in 2018 and became a national bestseller. He graduated from the journalism program at Toronto Metropolitan University in 2002, and spent most of his journalism career with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as a video journalist and radio host. He left CBC in 2020 to focus on his literary career. He lives in Sudbury, Ontario with his wife and three sons. His forthcoming novel, Moon of the Turning Leaves, will be published in October 2023.