Introducing the 2025 Giller Prize Jury

January 15, 2025

2025 Giller Prize jury

January 15, 2025 (Toronto, ON) – The Giller Foundation is thrilled to announce the five-member jury panel for the 2025 Giller Prize.

The Giller Prize celebrates the best in Canadian fiction – long format, short stories and graphic novels. Anne Michaels won the 2024 Prize for her novel, Held.

Chairing the jury panel is acclaimed author and creative writing professor Dionne Irving. Dionne is originally from Mississauga, Ontario. She is the author of Quint and The Islands. Her work has appeared in Story, Boulevard, LitHub, Missouri Review, and New Delta Review, among other journals and magazines. The Islands was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Giller Prize, the New American Voices Award and the Clara Johnson Award. Irving teaches in the Creative Writing Program and the Initiative on Race and Resilience at the University of Notre Dame.

Joining Dionne on the jury is fellow writer and winner of the 2024 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, Jordan Abel. Jordan Abel is a queer Nisga’a writer from Vancouver. He is the author of The Place of Scraps, winner of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, Un/inhabited, and Injun, winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize. NISHGA won both the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize and the VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres Award, and was a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, the Wilfrid Eggleston Award for Nonfiction, and the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize. Abel’s work has been published in numerous journals and magazines, including Canadian Literature, The Capilano Review, and The Fiddlehead, and his work has been anthologized widely, including The Broadview Introduction to Literature. Abel completed a Ph.D. at Simon Fraser University in 2019, and is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta where he teaches Indigenous Literatures, Research-Creation, and Creative Writing.

Loghan Paylor is a queer, trans author who lives in Abbotsford, British Columbia. Their short fiction and essays have previously appeared in Room and Prairie Fire, among others. Paylor has a Master’s in creative writing from the University of British Columbia, and a day job as a professional geek. Their first novel, The Cure for Drowning, was longlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize and named a Globe and Mail Best Book of 2024.

Deepa Rajagopalan is the author of the short story collection, Peacocks of Instagram, shortlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize. She won the 2021 PEN Canada New Voices Award for the title story of the collection. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. She has lived in many cities across India, the United States and Canada. Deepa works in the tech industry in Toronto.

Rounding out the jury is Aaron Tucker. Tucker is the author of seven books, including the novels Soldiers, Hunter’s Not Cowboys and Y: Oppenheimer, Horseman of Los Alamos. His poetry and collaborative new media work engaging with machine translation and 3D printing has been shown across Canada, and in the United States, Norway, and Brazil. His scholarly work on facial recognition technologies won the Governor General’s Gold Medal and his writing on artificial intelligence has been widely published in North America. He is currently an Assistant Professor at Memorial University in St. John’s, Newfoundland, teaching Creative Writing and Communication and Media Studies.

The longlist will be announced in mid-September followed by the shortlist announcement in early October. The winner will be named during a nationally televised awards ceremony honouring the finalists in Toronto in November.

Submissions are now being accepted. The submission package is available online. The submission deadlines are:

  • February 14, 2025 for books published between October 1, 2024 and February 28, 2025
  • April 17, 2025 for books published between March 1, 2025 and April 30, 2025
  • June 20, 2025 for books published between May 1, 2025 and June 30, 2025
  • August 15, 2025 for books published between July 1, 2025 and September 30, 2025

About the Prize
Founded by Jack Rabinovitch in 1994, the Giller Prize is Canada’s leading and most influential literary prize for fiction. The Giller Effect has been recognized industry-wide as one of the top drivers of book sales in Canada. The Giller Prize awards $100,000 annually to the author of the best Canadian novel, graphic novel or short story collection published in English, and $10,000 to each of the finalists. To date, the Giller Prize has awarded more than two million dollars to Canadian writers. The award is named in honour of Jack Rabinovitch’s wife, the late literary journalist, Doris Giller.

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