Noah Richler, Kevin Chong and Molly Johnson among 2024 Scotiabank Giller Prize jurors
American authors Dinaw Mengestu and Megha Majumdar round out the 5-person panel
Noah Richler, Kevin Chong and Molly Johnson are the Canadians on the 2024 Scotiabank Giller Prize jury.
The $100,000 prize is the biggest in Canadian literature.
Richler will chair the jury. He is an author and a former BBC radio producer and the National Post books section editor. His books include What We Talk About When We Talk About War, This Is My Country, What's Yours? and The Candidate: Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail. Raised in Montreal and London, U.K., he currently divides his time between Toronto and Digby, N.S.
Chong is a Vancouver-based writer and associate professor at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. His other books include the nonfiction book Northern Dancer: The Legendary Horse That Inspired A Nation and fiction titles like The Plague and Beauty Plus Pity. His latest book, The Double Life of Benson Yu, was a finalist for the 2023 Scotiabank Giller Prize.
Johnson is a singer songwriter and winner of two Juno Awards, the Governor General Award, the Order of Canada and the Chevalier Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. She is the founding artistic director of Toronto's Kensington Market Jazz Festival.
Joining Richler, Chong and Johnson on the jury are American authors Dinaw Mengestu and Megha Majumdar.
Mengestu is the author of the novels The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, How to Read the Air and All Our Names. He won a 2012 MacArthur Foundation Award as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship, Lannan Fiction Fellowship, The Guardian First Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Mengestu was born in Ethiopia and raised in Illinois and currently teaches at Georgetown University and Brooklyn College.
Majumdar is the author of the 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. Majumdar is based in New York and teaches at Princeton University.
2023 will mark the 31st anniversary of the Giller Prize. Books published between Oct. 1, 2023 and Sept. 30, 2024 will be eligible for the 2024 prize. The longlist, shortlist and winner will be announced in the fall.
Jack Rabinovitch founded the prize in honour of his late wife Doris Giller in 1994. Rabinovitch died in 2017 at the age of 87.
The 2023 winner was Sarah Bernstein for her novel Study for Obedience.
Other past Giller Prize winners include Suzette Mayr for The Sleeping Car Porter, Omar El Akkad for What Strange Paradise, Souvankham Thammavongsa for How to Pronounce Knife, Esi Edugyan for Washington Black and Half-Blood Blues, Margaret Atwood for Alias Grace, Ian Williams for Reproduction and Alice Munro for Runaway.
The Giller Prize is currently hosting a monthly virtual book club featuring the 2023 longlisted writers.
