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 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 Loghan Paylor. Loghan 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.

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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