Introducing the 2024 Scotiabank Giller Prize Jury

January 22, 2024

2024 Scotiabank Giller Prize jury

January 22, 2024 (Toronto, ON) – Elana Rabinovitch, Executive Director of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, today announced the five-member jury panel for the 2024 Scotiabank Giller Prize.

The Scotiabank Giller Prize celebrates the best in Canadian fiction – both long format and short stories. Sarah Bernstein won the 2023 Prize for her novel, Study for Obedience.

Chairing the jury panel is acclaimed author, former BBC Radio producer and National Post books section editor, Noah Richler. He has been nominated for a Governor General’s Literary Award, a Writers’ Trust Award, twice for the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing, won the B.C. Award for Canadian Non-fiction, three gold National Magazine Awards, and a Sony Award for his radio work. Currently, Richler divides his time between Toronto and Digby, Nova Scotia.

Joining Noah on the jury is fellow Canadian writer Kevin Chong. Chong’s latest novel, The Double Life of Benson Yu, was a finalist for the 2023 Scotiabank Giller Prize. He is an award-winning author of several books of fiction and nonfiction. His work has appeared in The Guardian, The Rumpus, and more. He currently lives in Vancouver and is an associate professor at the University of British Columbia.

Singer songwriter Molly Johnson has been captivating international audiences for years and is also the recipient of a laureate of multiple notable awards, including two JUNO Awards, the Governor General Award, the Order of Canada, and the Chevalier Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Johnson is also the founding artistic director of Toronto’s Kensington Market Jazz Festival.

International jurors:

Dinaw Mengestu was a recipient of the 2012 MacArthur Foundation Award, was born in Ethiopia and raised in Illinois. Mengestu is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Lannan Fiction Fellowship, The Guardian First Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among other awards. He is the author of four novels and is the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of the Humanities and the Director of the Written Arts program and the Center for Ethics and Writing.

Our final juror, Megha Majumdar, is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel A Burning, which was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, and the American Library Association’s Andrew Carnegie Medal. A 2022 Whiting Award winner, Majumdar lives in New York and teaches at Princeton University.

This year’s jury panel is composed of the finest minds, readers with a first-rate grasp of the true breadth and scope of genre-bending Canadian literature, its global range and commutation of literary conventions.

This year, Kobo will be providing each of the jurors with a Kobo Libra 2 eReader to help them on their reading journey.

The longlist will be presented at an event in early September in St. John’s Newfoundland, with the shortlist announced in early October in Toronto. The winner will be named during a nationally televised black-tie dinner and awards ceremony honouring the finalists in Toronto in November.

Submissions are now being accepted. The 2024 submission package is available on our websitescotiabankgillerprize.ca/submissions. The submission deadlines are:

  • February 16, 2024 for books published between October 1, 2023 and February 29, 2024
  • April 19, 2024 for books published between March 1, 2024 and April 30, 2024
  • June 21, 2024 for books published between May 1, 2024 and June 30, 2024
  • August 16, 2024 for books published between July 1, 2024 and September 30, 2024

Submissions received after the final deadline of August 16, 2024 will be deemed ineligible.

About the Prize
The Giller Prize, founded by Jack Rabinovitch in 1994, highlights the very best in Canadian fiction year after year. In 2005, the prize teamed up with Scotiabank who increased the winnings four-fold. The Scotiabank Giller Prize now 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 by her husband Toronto businessman Jack Rabinovitch, who passed away in August 2017.

About Scotiabank
Scotiabank is a leading bank in the Americas. Guided by our purpose: “for every future”, we help our customers, their families and their communities achieve success 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 over 90,000 employees and assets of approximately $1.4 trillion (as at July 31, 2023), Scotiabank trades on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: BNS) and New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: BNS). For more information, please visit http://www.scotiabank.com and follow us on X @Scotiabank.

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Media enquiries:
Elana Rabinovitch, Scotiabank Giller Prize
Elana@gillerprize.ca

T: 416-275-5418