The Scotiabank Giller Prize Announces the 2007 Shortlist

October 9, 2007

Today, in a morning press conference that drew over 100 media and members of the publishing industry, the Scotiabank Giller Prize announced its 2007 shortlist. Selected by an esteemed jury panel comprised of author and 2005 Scotiabank Giller Prize winner David Bergen, author Camilla Gibb and author, poet and artist Lorna Goodison, the five finalists were chosen from a record 108 books submitted for consideration by 46 publishing houses from every region of the country.

The jury named the finalists. They are:

Jack Rabinovitch, who founded the Prize in 1994 in memory of his late wife, literary journalist Doris Giller, spoke at the press conference. He was joined by John Doig, Senior Vice-President, Marketing, Domestic Personal Banking, Scotiabank and Susanne Boyce, President, Creative, Content and Channels, CTV. Scotiabank Giller Prize jurors David Bergen, Camilla Gibb, and Lorna Goodison announced the shortlist.

CTV Broadcast

The Scotiabank Giller Prize is delighted to announce that CTV is the broadcast partner for The Scotiabank Giller Prize gala for the third year in a row. To air live on Bravo! as well as on CTV, CTV’s Seamus O’Regan will reprise his role as host of the broadcast. Additional details will be announced soon. The 2006 Scotiabank Giller Prize reached more than 1.3 million Canadians on CTV and was the most-watched Giller Prize ever.

Scotiabank Partnership

In September of 2005, Jack Rabinovitch announced that Scotiabank would become the first ever co-sponsor of Canada’s richest literary award for fiction. Under the new agreement, the prize became known as the Scotiabank Giller Prize. As a result of the bank’s involvement, the prize purse doubled, growing to $50,000 CAD with $40,000 going to the winner, and $2,500 being given to each of the four finalists.

This year, the finalists will be honoured and a winner announced at a gala black tie dinner and awards ceremony to be held at Toronto’s Four Seasons Hotel on November 6.

‘Guess the Giller’ Promotion

The Scotiabank Giller Prize is pleased to be broadening the reach of its Guess the Giller program this year, with more than 20 public library systems and 950 Scotiabank branches across the country participating. The contest is open to the public at www.guessthegiller.ca. The grand prize is an all-expense paid trip for two to one of Canada’s leading literary festivals with runner-up prizes of the signed, shortlisted books for this year. The Guess the Giller promotion began with the Toronto Public Library through a pilot project in 2003.

Harbourfront International Festival of Authors

For the fourth year in a row, the Scotiabank Giller Prize finalists will have the honour of reading at the IFOA’s Closing Night on Saturday, October 27. For more information, please visit www.harbourfrontcentre.com.

The Giller Light

On Giller night, November 6 – and for the fifth year in a row - Frontier College will host the alternative Giller party of the year – the Scotiabank Giller Light Bash. Since 2002, this event has raised more than $100,000 for Frontier College Homework Clubs in Toronto and Winnipeg. Each year, more than 600 people attend the event to support literacy and celebrate Canadian literature. Please visit www.gillerlightbash.ca for tickets or more information.

Scotiabank

Scotiabank is committed to supporting the communities in which we live and work, both in Canada and abroad. Recognized as a leader internationally and among Canadian corporations for its charitable donations and philanthropic activities, in 2006 the Bank provided more than $42 million in sponsorships and donations to a variety of projects and initiatives, primarily in the areas of healthcare, education, social services and arts and culture. Scotiabank is on the World Wide Web at www.scotiabank.com.

CTV

CTV, Canada's largest private broadcaster, offers a wide range of quality news, sports, information, and entertainment programming. It has the number-one national newscast, CTV National News With Lloyd Robertson, and is the number-one choice for prime-time viewing. CTVglobemedia Inc. is Canada's premier multi-media company which owns CTV Inc. and The Globe and Mail. CTV Inc. also owns radio stations across the country, and leading national specialty channels. Other CTVglobemedia investments include an interest in Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, and in Dome Productions, a North American leader in the provision of mobile high definition production facilities. More information about CTV may be found on the company website at www.ctv.ca.

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The Scotiabank Giller Prize awards $40,000 annually to the author of the best Canadian novel or short story collection published in English and $2,500 to each of the finalists. The Scotiabank Giller Prize is named in honour of the late literary journalist Doris Giller and was founded in 1994 by her husband Toronto businessman Jack Rabinovitch.

Elizabeth Hay

LATE NIGHTS ON AIR
McClelland & Stewart

Harry Boyd, a hard-bitten refugee from failure in Toronto television, has returned to a small radio station in the Canadian North. There, in Yellowknife, in the summer of 1975, he falls in love with a voice on air, though the real woman, Dido Paris, is both a surprise and even more than he imagined. Dido and Harry are part of the cast of eccentric, utterly loveable characters, all transplants from elsewhere, who form an unlikely group at the station. Their loves and longings, their rivalries and entanglements, the stories of their pasts and what brought each of them to the North, form the centre of the novel.

For 10 years Elizabeth Hay worked as a CBC radio broadcaster in Yellowknife, Winnipeg, and Toronto. In 2002 she received the Marian Engel Award for a body of work that includes novels, short fiction, and creative non-fiction. Her first novel A Student of Weather (2000) was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Ottawa Book Award, and the Pearson Canada Reader's Choice Award at The Word on the Street, and winner of the CAA MOSAID Technologies Inc. Award for Fiction and the TORGI Award. Her second novel, Garbo Laughs (2003) won the Ottawa Book Award and was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award. Hay is also the author of Crossing the Snow Line (stories, 1989); The Only Snow in Havana (non-fiction, 1992), which was a co-winner of the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-fiction; Captivity Tales: Canadians in New York (non-fiction, 1993), and Small Change (stories, 1997), which was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award, the Trillium Book Award, and the Rogers Communications Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Elizabeth Hay lives in Ottawa, Ontario.

Michael Ondaatje

DIVISADERO
McClelland & Stewart

In the 1970s in northern California, near Gold Rush country, a father and his teenage daughters, Anna and Claire, work their farm with the help of Coop, an enigmatic young man who makes his home with them. Theirs is a makeshift family, until it is riven by an incident of violence — of both hand and heart — that sets fire to the rest of their lives. The novel takes us from the city of San Francisco to the raucous backrooms of Nevada’s casinos, and eventually to the landscape of south central France. It is here, outside a small rural village, that Anna becomes immersed in the life and the world of a writer from an earlier time — Lucien Segura. His compelling story, which has its beginnings at the turn of the century, circles around “the raw truth” of Anna’s own life, the one she’s left behind but can never truly leave. As the narrative moves back and forth in time and place, we discover each of the characters managing to find some foothold in a present rough-hewn from the past.

Michael Ondaatje’s novels include In the Skin of a Lion, which won the 1988 City of Toronto Book Award and was selected for the first “Canada Reads” edition in 2002; The English Patient, which won the Booker Prize, the Canada Australia Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award, and was later adapted to film and won the Academy Award for Best Picture; and Anil’s Ghost, which won the 2000 Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Prix Medicis, the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Prize, the 2001 Irish Times International Fiction Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award. His other books include Running in the Family, Coming Through Slaughter, The Cinnamon Peeler, and Handwriting. In 1988 Michael Ondaatje was made an Officer of the Order of Canada and two years later became a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Michael Ondaatje lives in Toronto.

Daniel Poliquin

A SECRET BETWEEN US
Translation by Donald Winkler
Douglas & McIntyre

When young Lusignan sets off from Ottawa to the First World War with the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, he has already survived a tragicomic Catholic childhood and a writing career that has brought him both acclaim and disgrace. Shortly before the men depart for Europe, Lusignan has an encounter with a fellow officer, the aristocratic Essiambre d’Argenteuil, that proves to be the defining moment of his life. Returning from Europe a hollow man, Lusignan keeps the memory alive by shadowing Amalia Driscoll, a woman whose strait-laced proprieties were challenged by this same d’Argenteuil. He encounters Concorde, the untutored young maid struggling to get by in the Flats district of Ottawa, and the Capuchin monk Father Mathrun, who longs for martyrdom in a foreign land. Providing the backdrop to Poliquin’s incisive character study is a vivid evocation of a pivotal era in Canadian history.

Daniel Poliquin is an accomplished translator and interpreter, and the award-winning author of such works as Temps pascal, L’homme de paille, Visions de Jude, and L’écureuil noir. As a translator, Dr. Poliquin has made such great writers as Jack Kerouac, Mordecai Richler, W.O. Mitchell and others more accessible to Francophone audiences. An ardent promoter of the interests of Franco-Ontarians and other Francophones, Daniel Poliquin is a Chevalier in the Ordre de la Pléiade, and a Member of the Order of Canada.

Donald Winkler was born in Winnipeg in 1940, graduated from the University of Manitoba in 1961, and as a Woodrow Wilson Scholar, did graduate work at the Yale School of Drama. In 1994 he won the Governor General’s Award for French to English translation, and has been a finalist for the Governor General’s Award on two other occasions. A Secret Between Us is Winkler’s translation of Daniel Poliquin’s La Kermesse.

M.G. Vassanji

THE ASSASSIN’S SONG
Doubleday Canada

In The Assassin’s Song, Karsan Dargawalla tells the story of the medieval Sufi shrine of Pirbaag, and his betrayal of its legacy. From the age of eleven, Karsan has been told that one day he will succeed his father as guardian of the Shrine of the Wanderer: as the highest spiritual authority in their region, he will be God’s representative to the multitudes who come to the shrine for penance and worship. But Karsan’s longings are simpler: to play cricket with his friends, to discover more of the exciting world he reads about in the newspapers his friend Raja Singh, a truck driver, brings him from all over India. Half on a whim, Karsan applies to study at Harvard and when he is unexpectedly offered a scholarship there he must try to meld his family’s wishes with his own yearnings. Two years immersed in the intellectual and sexual ferment of America splits him further, until finally Karsan abdicates his succession to the eight hundred-year-old throne. Even as Karsan succeeds in his "ordinary" life – marrying and having a son, becoming a professor in suburban British Columbia – his heritage haunts him in unexpected ways. After tragedy strikes, both in Canada and Pirbaag, he is drawn back across thirty years of silence and separation to discover what, if anything is left for him in India.

M.G. Vassanji was born in Kenya and raised in Tanzania. He holds a Ph.D. in nuclear physics, but chose in 1980 to become a writer. His work has gone on to receive considerable critical acclaim, awards and an international audience. The Gunny Sack won a regional Commonwealth Writers Prize in 1990. In 1994 he won the Harbourfront Festival Prize and was one of 12 Canadians chosen for Maclean's Magazine's Honour Roll. Vassanji won the inaugural Giller Prize in 1994 for The Book of Secrets and was the first writer to win the Scotiabank Giller Prize a second time in 2003 for The In-Between World of Vikram Lall. In 2006, When She Was Queen was shortlisted for the City of Toronto Book Award. M.G. Vassanji is a Member of the Order of Canada. He lives in Toronto.

Alissa York

EFFIGY
Random House Canada

Dorrie, a shock-pale child with a mass of untameable black hair, cannot recall anything of her life before she recovered from an illness at seven. A solitary child, she spends her spare time learning the art of taxidermy, completely fascinated by the act of bringing new and eternal life to the bodies of the dead. At 14, her parents marry her off to Erastus Hammer, a polygamous horse breeder and renowned hunter, who does not want to bed her but instead wants her to create trophies of his most impressive kills, as he is slowly going blind. Happy to be given this work, Dorrie secludes herself in her workshop, away from Mother Hammer’s watchful eyes and the rivalry between the elder wives. But as the novel opens, Hammer has brought Dorrie his latest kills, a family of wolves, and for the first time in her short life she struggles with her craft, dreaming each night of crows and strange scenes of violence. The new hand, Bendy Drown, is the only one to see her dilemma and to offer her help, a dangerous game in a Mormon household. Outside, a lone wolf prowls the grounds looking for his lost pack, and his night time searching will unearth the tensions and secrets of this complicated and conflicted family.

Alissa York’s highly acclaimed first novel, Mercy, was published in 2003. She won the Mary Scorer Award for Best Book by a Manitoba writer for her short story collection, Any Given Power. Her stories have also won the Journey Prize and the Bronwen Wallace Award, and in 2001 she won the John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Manitoba Writer. Alissa York lives in Toronto.