Everything you need to know about the 5 finalists for the $100K Giller Prize
The winner will be revealed on Nov. 18, 2024
Éric Chacour, Anne Fleming, Conor Kerr, Anne Michaels and Deepa Rajagopalan are the five writers shortlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize.
The $100,000 award annually recognizes the best in Canadian fiction.
The 2024 Giller Prize award ceremony will be broadcast on Monday, Nov. 18, at 9 p.m. local time — except in Atlantic Canada (11:30 p.m.) and Newfoundland (12:00 a.m) — on CBC TV and CBC Gem and also available at 9 p.m. local time on CBC's YouTube channel. It will also be broadcast on CBC Radio One and CBC Listen.
The 2024 shortlist features four novels and one short story collection, covering a wide range of material, from South Asian diaspora experiences to queer historical romance to contemporary Métis stories.
It includes two writers with debut books: Chacour for What I Know About You, translated by Pablo Strauss, and Rajagopalan for Peacocks of Instagram.
All finalists but Michaels are making their first appearance on the Giller shortlist.
Michaels, recognized this year for Held, was shortlisted for the 1996 Giller Prize for Fugitive Pieces and in 2009 for The Winter Vault. Kerr, who is shortlisted for Prairie Edge, was previously longlisted in 2022 for his novel Avenue of Champions.
Kerr is also one of the 2025 judges for the CBC Short Story Prize.
The shortlisted books are available in accessible format through the National Network for Equitable Library Services and the Centre for Equitable Library Access.
Pushback from some authors
In July, more than 20 authors pulled their books from consideration for the prize, which is sponsored by Scotiabank, to protest the bank's investment in Elbit Systems, an Israeli defence contractor. As of the short list announcement, 45 authors had signed a letter demanding the Giller Foundation pressure Scotiabank to fully divest from Elbit Systems.
Scotiabank had reduced its holdings in Elbit Systems by more than two-thirds as of Aug. 14, according to the Canadian Press.
As of Monday (Nov. 18), a fresh call from CanLit Responds for the Giller Prize to divest from Scotiabank has received more than 300 signatories, all of whom pledged to abstain from submitting works to the prize or participating in any events related to it until demands are met.
The Giller organizers have removed Scotiabank's name from the prize. It still remains the prize's lead sponsor.
"Scotiabank continues to be the lead sponsor of the Giller Prize and we remain grateful for their support," said Giller Prize executive director Elana Rabinovitch, in an email to CBC Books when the long list was announced. "The decision to remove their name was made so that the focus would be on these exceptional authors and their achievements, and to give the stage to Canada's best storytellers of today and tomorrow."
"Ultimately, more than ever, we want to ensure the prize stays true to its purpose: to celebrate the best in Canadian fiction and to give the stage to Canada's best storytellers. For us, that means ensuring the focus remains solely on the Prize and the art itself."
Scotiabank confirmed they are continuing to sponsor the Giller Foundation and the 2024 Giller Prize via email.
The 2024 shortlist was chosen from more than 100 books by a jury chaired by author and producer Noah Richler and included writer and professor Kevin Chong and singer-songwriter Molly Johnson. When the jury was announced in January, it also included international jurors Dinaw Mengestu and Megha Majumdar, who have since stepped down.
Last year's winner was Sarah Bernstein, for her novel Study for Obedience. Bernstein signed the letter calling for the prize to cut ties with Scotiabank. Omar El Akkad, who won the prize in 2021, also signed it.
Other past Giller Prize winners include Suzette Mayr for The Sleeping Car Porter; Souvankham Thammavongsa for How to Pronounce Knife; Esi Edugyan for Washington Black; Michael Redhill for Bellevue Square; Margaret Atwood for Alias Grace; Mordecai Richler for Barney's Version; André Alexis for Fifteen Dogs; and Madeleine Thien for Do Not Say We Have Nothing.
Toronto businessman Jack Rabinovitch founded the prize in honour of his late wife, literary journalist Doris Giller, in 1994. Rabinovitch died in 2017 at the age of 87.
You can learn more about the shortlisted books and authors below.
What I Know About You by Éric Chacour, translated by Pablo Strauss
In What I Know About You, Tarek is on the right path: he'll be a doctor like his father, marry and have children. But when he falls for his patient's son, Ali, his life is turned upside down as he realizes his sexuality against a backdrop of political turmoil in 1960s Cairo. In the 2000s, Tarek is now a doctor in Montreal. When someone begins to write to him and about him, the past that he's been trying to forget comes back to haunt him.
"At a moment, there is this incompatibility between the tradition and what he feels inside," said Chacour in an interview on Bookends with Mattea Roach.
"So what was not a pressure at first becomes a pressure and becomes impossible to avoid. So he has to make a decision, quite radical, and flee away to Montreal."
There is this incompatibility between the tradition and what he feels inside.- Éric Chacour
What I Know About You is also shortlisted for the 2024 Atwood Gibson fiction prize.
Chacour is a Montreal-based writer who was born to Egyptian parents and grew up between France and Quebec. In addition to writing, he works in the financial sector. What I Know About You is his first book and was a bestseller in its French edition, winning many awards, including the Prix Femina.
Pablo Strauss has translated 12 works of fiction, several graphic novels and one screenplay. He was a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award for translation for The Country Will Bring Us No Peace, Synapses and The Longest Year. His translation of Le plongeur by Stephane Larue (The Dishwasher in English) won the 2020 Amazon First Novel Award. He lives in Quebec City.
Giller Prize jury citation: "One man's love for another breaches the norms of gender, society and class in the otherwise modernizing, secular Egypt of Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat. Tarek, a doctor, nurtures a love that comes to him unexpectedly and neither his country, nor his family is able to accept. Elegantly told and profoundly affecting, What I Know About You speaks to the inherited moral structures constraining us, and to the alienation of a man's inner life rendered external.
"Tarek leaves Cairo and his marriage for Montreal, a cold and foreign city in which his otherness is of a more ordinary kind but, when circumstances finally permit, returns to confront the past and its consequences nebulously in pursuit of him. Here is a quiet, touching story in which the acts of yearning, stymied hearts transcend their troubled genesis and move their hosts towards the possibility of redemption that is love's essence."
Here is a quiet, touching story in which the acts of yearning, stymied hearts transcend their troubled genesis and move their hosts towards the possibility of redemption that is love's essence.- Giller Prize jury
Curiosities by Anne Fleming
Curiosities centres around an amateur historian who discovers an obscure memoir from 1600s England that explores a love that could not be explained in those times. Weaving together different fictional accounts, the novel tells the life stories of Joan and Thomasina, the only two survivors of a village ravaged by the plague, and how they eventually find each other again. Thomasina, now Tom, navigates the world in boy's clothes and as a male, but faces a struggle when discovered, naked, by a member of the clergy.
"It feels like a perfect thing for a novel to imagine the lives of these people, whose lives mostly would not have been documented in any way, or would have been documented in very small ways by birth and death records and marriage records, for instance," said Fleming on an upcoming episode of Bookends with Mattea Roach.
"A lot of historical fiction, and many of it that I love, features major players in the history as we know it and I was really interested in people who are not major players at all and yet I think and I believe have valuable, important, significant lives."
I was really interested in people who are not major players at all and yet I think and I believe have valuable, important, significant lives.- Anne Fleming
Fleming is an author based in Victoria. Her books include Pool-Hopping and Other Stories, which was shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize.
She has also written a middle-grade novel, The Goat, which was a Junior Library Guild and White Ravens selection.
Giller Prize jury citation: "Anne Fleming's Curiosities begins in 17th century England beset by the plague and rife with superstition and fear. A series of archived memoirs that the amateur historian Anne is researching provide a puzzle and the means by which this thrillingly inventive novel immerses us in the historic and illuminates the contemporary. Joan, the only one of her family to survive 'the sicknesse,' takes up with another child, Thomasina, alone and nursed by a goat.
"They find allies where they can, notably 'Old Nut,' an ostracized woman who is imprisoned, tried and executed because she is thought to be a witch, as Joan is later assumed to be, before their paths, perilous and radically different, diverge.
"'Tom,' disguised as a boy, joins the crew of a ship sailing through Hudson's Bay, while Lady Margaret Long, a naturalist and thoroughly modern woman, takes Joan underwing. Singular and surprising, Curiosities is a captivating story of hope, change, and belonging, and first and foremost a testament to varieties of love that endure beyond any one history or era."
Curiosities is a captivating story of hope, change, and belonging, and first and foremost a testament to varieties of love that endure beyond any one history or era.- Giller Prize jury
Prairie Edge by Conor Kerr
In Prairie Edge, Isidore (Ezzy) Desjarlais and Grey Ginther live together in Grey's uncle's trailer, passing their time with cribbage and cheap beer. Grey is cynical of what she feels is a lazy and performative activist culture, while Grey is simply devoted to his distant cousin. So when Grey concocts a scheme to set a herd of bison loose in downtown Edmonton, Ezzy is along for the ride — one that has devastating, fatal consequences.
"When you have bison return to a landscape, especially in urban space like Edmonton, there's a return back to an Indigenous governance structure and a lifestyle in a society that we necessarily haven't seen yet," said Kerr in an interview on The Next Chapter.
"For Grey, this is actual LandBack in action by the restoration of bison in the spaces that they would have historically always been in."
This is actual LandBack in action by the restoration of bison in the spaces that they would have historically always been in.- Conor Kerr
Prairie Edge is also shortlisted for the 2024 Atwood Gibson fiction prize.
Kerr is a Métis/Ukrainian writer who has lived in a number of prairie towns and cities, including Saskatoon. He now lives in Edmonton. A 2022 CBC Books writer to watch, his previous works include the poetry collection Old Gods and the novel Avenue of Champions, which was longlisted for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize, and won the ReLit award the same year. Kerr currently teaches creative writing at the University of Alberta.
Giller Prize jury citation: "Conor Kerr's Prairie Edge is both a propulsive crime narrative built around successive, compounding blunders and a work of literary art that tells us about what it means to live in a world where action and rhetoric around decolonization fail to align. Its two main characters, an idealistic, would-be academic and an endearingly naive ex-con, both Métis, hatch a quixotic plan to re-home bison from national parks to downtown Edmonton, where they once ran free, as a bold statement against the settler status quo.
"Kerr extracts maximum amounts of comedy and pathos from the novel's premise while populating this fictional world with resonant characters whose difficult experiences with group homes, social services, and activist circles are softened by enduring family bonds and friendships. Kerr entertains us with a contemporary caper while inviting readers to consider a future that has reckoned with the past."
Kerr entertains us with a contemporary caper while inviting readers to consider a future that has reckoned with the past.- Giller Prize jury
Held by Anne Michaels
Weaving in historical figures and events, the mysterious, generations-spanning novel Held begins on a First World War battlefield near the River Aisne in 1917, where John lies in the falling snow, unable to move or feel his legs. When he returns home to North Yorkshire with life-changing injuries, he reopens his photography business in an effort to move on with his life. But the past proves harder to escape than he thought and John is haunted by ghosts that begin to surface in his photos with messages he struggles to decipher.
"The narrative dips in and out of various places and times, and in many ways is trying to express all the ways that love continues its work past the span of a single life," said Michaels in an interview with Q's Tom Power.
"We're used to thinking about history as actions and events, but it's also the story of our inner lives, the force of our inner lives, what we believe in, what we aspire to, what our values are. And I wanted to really bring us to present moments in relationship to history that have to do with the power of that inner life."
The narrative dips in and out of various places and times, and in many ways is trying to express all the ways that love continues its work past the span of a single life.- Anne Michaels
Held is also shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize.
Michaels is the winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, the Trillium Book Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She has been shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Giller Prize.
Giller Prize jury citation: "Anne Michaels' Held is a novel that floats, a beguiling association of memories, projections, and haunted instances through which the very notion of our mortality, of our resilience and desires, is interrogated in passages as impactful as they can be hypnotic. Ostensibly Held begins with a man, John, lying injured on a First World War battlefield who returns, broken, to the woman he loves and his Yorkshire photography studio, where ghostly figures emerge from the shadows of the photographs he develops — the sorts of 'images that can, like certain rhythms, dismantle us.'
"In a story of querulous fragments refuting a novel's usual form, Michaels conveys war's legacy of harm and trauma reverberating across generations, but through them all our irrefutable connectedness. Michaels' mastery of word and situations is understated but insistent, an altogether successful reliance that deflects attention from its author and embeds the reader in the resoundingly mysterious and ephemeral. Here is a novel in which we are willingly held."
Here is a novel in which we are willingly held.- Giller Prize jury
Peacocks of Instagram by Deepa Rajagopalan
The collection of stories in Peacocks of Instagram provides a tapestry of the Indian diaspora. Tales of revenge, love, desire and family explore the intense ramifications of privilege, or lack thereof. Coffee shop and hotel housekeeping employees, engineers and children show us all of themselves, flaws and everything.
"I wanted to present South Asian people as well-rounded people, in many ways," said Rajagopalan in an interview on The Next Chapter.
"It could be dismantling the stereotype of what we think they should be, and also separating race from the characterization, because race should never be a shortcut to characterization. One of the ways I tried to do it is by giving them a sense of humour, by writing characters who are funny.
I wanted to present South Asian people as well-rounded people.- Deepa Rajagopalan
Rajagopalan was the 2021 RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award winner. Born to Indian parents in Saudi Arabia, she has lived across India, the United States and Canada. Her previous writing has appeared in publications such as the Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology, the New Quarterly, Room and Arc. Rajagopalan now lives and works in Toronto.
Giller Prize jury citation: "An utterly absorbing, often hilarious story collection, Deepa Rajagopalan's Peacocks of Instagram reimagines the literature of the Indian diaspora in the age of globe-trotting IT workers, climate change, and social media influencers. A divorced woman channels her grief over the demise of her marriage into a bestselling line of ceramics. A factory owner in Johannesburg learns about the 'secret' life led by his sometimes girlfriend in Toronto at her funeral.
"A young woman takes revenge on her oil lobbyist foster dad. Written in mature, perfectly rounded prose embroidered with telling detail and pithy dialogue, the loosely linked stories of this arresting debut collection follow an array of appealing characters who not only withstand heartbreak and misunderstanding but occasionally triumph over it by dint of their wit and cunning. In their discovery of themselves and their capabilities, Rajagopalan's stories continually surprise."
In their discovery of themselves and their capabilities, Rajagopalan's stories continually surprise.- Giller Prize jury
With files from CP
