Yesterday the longlist for one of my favourite literary prizes was announced! It’s the Scotiabank Giller Prize, which is a Canadian prize for fiction. So first, for those of you who aren’t Canadian and/or haven’t heard of the prize before, here’s a little bit about it:
The Giller Prize was founded in 1994 by Jack Rabinovitch in honour of his late wife, literary journalist Doris Giller, who passed away from cancer the year before. The award recognized excellence in Canadian fiction – long format or short stories – and endowed a cash prize annually of $25,000.00, the largest purse for literature in the country.
The launch of The Giller Prize coincided with a growing recognition of Canadian authors and literature both at home and abroad. Acclaimed writers such as Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje and Mordecai Richler were winning honours and accolades around the world. The time seemed ripe to celebrate the success of these and other homegrown writers within these borders, with a bold statement of support and recognition.
The Giller Prize, along with many other awards that came before and after, is in part responsible for the continued growth of Canadian literary talent. The prize has so far endowed more than three-quarters of a million dollars to Canadian writers from coast to coast. – Scotiabank Giller Prize website
The criteria for the prize are, in brief:
- The book must be a first edition novel or short story collection
- Written by a Canadian citizen or permanent resident of Canada
- Published in English (original or translated – if translation 30% of any money won goes to the translator, which I think is kind of cool)
- Must be published in Canada between October 1 of the previous year and September 30 of the current year – translated work can’t be more than 5 years from original publication date
- Previous winners are eligible
- No YA, graphic novels or comic books
- No posthumous selections
These are the main ones, but there are more rules, so if you want to review them for yourself go here.
I love the Scotiabank Giller Prize. I love that it always, without fail, alerts me to Canadian books I otherwise never would have found. I love that it is all about literature that comes from where I’m from. I love that it is usually varied and has a good range of diversity (this year, for example, 2/3 of the books are by women, one by a two-spirit author, one is translated from French and at least six are by people of colour). If you are interested in more statistics about this year’s authors, check out Laura Frey’s fantastic video “The Giller Prize 2018: Longlist by the numbers.”
If you’d like to look at this year’s jury, you can find more info and bios here.
Now that you know a little about the prize, let’s look at this year’s Longlist!
Paige Cooper’s short stories catalogue moments in love. These are stories about women who built time machines when they were nine, or who predict cataclysm, or who think their dreams are reality. They include police horses with talons and giant eagles and weredeer. At the center of it all is love. And if love is the problem, what is the solution? Being closer? Or being alone?
Frances Price – tart widow, possessive mother, and Upper East Side force of nature – is in dire straits, beset by scandal and impending bankruptcy. Her adult son Malcolm is no help, mired in a permanent state of arrested development. And then there’s the Prices’ aging cat, Small Frank, who Frances believes houses the spirit of her late husband, an infamously immoral litigator and world-class cad whose gruesome tabloid death rendered Frances and Malcolm social outcasts.
Putting penury and pariahdom behind them, the family decides to cut their losses and head for the exit. One ocean voyage later, the curious trio land in their beloved Paris, the City of Light serving as a backdrop not for love or romance, but self destruction and economical ruin – to riotous effect. A number of singular characters serve to round out the cast: a bashful private investigator, an aimless psychic proposing a seance, a doctor who makes house calls with his wine merchant in tow, and the inimitable Mme. Reynard, aggressive houseguest and dementedly friendly American expat.
Nuns that appear out of thin air, a dinner party at the Goebbels’, Quebec’s very own Margaret Thatcher, a grandma that just won’t die (not until the archangel comes back)… Songs for the Cold of Heart is a yarn to rival the best of them, a big fat whopper of a tall tale that bounces around from provincial Rivière-du-Loup in 1919 to Nagasaki, 1990s Berlin, Rome, and beyond. This is the novel of a century—long and glorious, stuffed full of parallels, repeating motifs, and unforgettable characters—with the passion and plotting of a modern-day Tosca. (Translated from French by Peter McCambridge)
Working in the sticky heat of the Barbados sugar plantation where he was born, 11-year-old field slave Washington Black is terrified when he’s made manservant to his master’s offbeat brother. But naturalist/explorer Wilde, or “Titch,” eagerly introduces Wash to a brave new world and protects him when a bounty is placed on his head, as they flee north along America’s Atlantic coast to the chilly Arctic. But in their world, can friendship last?
Rawi Hage makes a stunning and mature return to wartorn Beirut of the 1970s, during the Civil War.
Beirut Hellfire Society follows Pavlov, the twenty-something son of an undertaker, who, after his father’s death, is approached by a member of the mysterious Hellfire Society–an anti-religious sect that, among their many rebellious and often salacious activities, arrange secret burial for those who have been denied it because the deceased was homosexual, atheist, or otherwise outcast and abandoned by their family, church, and state. Pavlov agrees to take up his father’s work for the Society, and over the course of the novel acts as survivor-chronicler of his torn and fading community, bearing witness to both its enduring rituals and its inevitable decline.
Combining comedy and tragedy, Beirut Hellfire Society is a brilliant, urgent meditation on what it is to live through war. It asks what, if anything, can be accomplished or preserved in the face of certain change and certain death. In short, this is a spectacular and timely new work from one of our major writers, and a mature, exhilarating return to some of the themes the author began to explore in his transcendent first novel, De Niro’s Game.
When I was younger, thinking about whether I wanted children, I always came back to this formula: If no one had told me anything about the world, I would have invented boyfriends. I’d have invented sex, friendships, art. I would not have invented child-rearing. I would have had to invent those other things to fulfil real longings in me, but if no one had ever told me that a person could create a person, and raise them into a citizen, it wouldn’t have occurred to me as something to do. In fact, it would have sounded like a task to very much avoid.
After the tumult of her 20s, the narrator of Sheila Heti’s new novel finds herself living a life into which she could bring a child. She’s with a man who has promised his support if she decides she wants to be a mother, “but you have to be sure.” Motherhood chronicles her struggle, under pressure from friends, culture and time, and seeking answers from family, strangers, mysticism and chance, to make a wise and moral choice, and to truly understand what is gained, and what is lost, when a woman becomes a mother.
Heti treats the most universal and consequential decision of early to mid-adulthood–whether to have kids–with the candour and originality that have won her international acclaim, and that made How Should a Person Be? required reading for a generation of young women. The result is a courageous, funny and ultimately moving novel about motherhood, selfhood, and how–and for whom–to live.
There was nothing to do but tell stories. Tell this story.
And then? Asked Cora.
And then everything, said Finn.
Newfoundland, Canada, 1992. When all the fish vanish from the waters, and the cod industry abruptly collapses, it’s not long before the people begin to disappear from the town of Big Running as well. As residents are forced to leave the island in search of work, 10-year-old Finn Connor suddenly finds himself living in a ghost town. There’s no school, no friends and whole rows of houses stand abandoned. And then Finn’s parents announce that they too must separate if their family is to survive.
But Finn still has his sister, Cora, with whom he counts the dwindling boats on the coast at night, and Mrs Callaghan, who teaches him the strange and ancient melodies of their native Ireland. That is until his sister disappears, and Finn must find a way of calling home the family and the life he has lost.
America is in the grip of a deadly flu pandemic. When Frank catches the virus, his girlfriend Polly will do whatever it takes to save him, even if it means risking everything. She agrees to a radical plan—time travel has been invented in the future to thwart the virus. If she signs up for a one-way-trip into the future to work as a bonded labourer, the company will pay for the life-saving treatment Frank needs. Polly promises to meet Frank again in Galveston, Texas, where she will arrive in twelve years.
But when Polly is re-routed an extra five years into the future, Frank is nowhere to be found. Alone in a changed and divided America, with no status and no money, Polly must navigate a new life and find a way to locate Frank, to discover if he is alive, and if their love has endured.
Internationally celebrated as one of literature’s most gifted stylists, Lisa Moore returns with her third story collection, a soaring chorus of voices, dreams, loves, and lives. Taking us from the Fjord of Eternity to the streets of St. John’s and the swamps of Orlando, these stories show us the timeless, the tragic, and the miraculous hidden in the underbelly of our everyday lives. A missing rock god may have jumped a cruise ship — in the Arctic. A grieving young woman may live next to a serial rapist. A man’s last day on earth replays in the minds of others in a furiously sensual, heartrending fugue. Something for Everyone is Moore at the peak of her prowess — she seems bent on nothing less than rewiring the circuitry of the short story itself.
Fact can be as strange as fiction. It can also be as dark, as violent, as rapturous. In the end, there may be no difference between them.
A girl grows up in Nunavut in the 1970s. She knows joy, and friendship, and parents’ love. She knows boredom, and listlessness, and bullying. She knows the tedium of the everyday world, and the raw, amoral power of the ice and sky, the seductive energy of the animal world. She knows the ravages of alcohol, and violence at the hands of those she should be able to trust. She sees the spirits that surround her, and the immense power that dwarfs all of us.
When she becomes pregnant, she must navigate all this.
Veering back and forth between the grittiest features of a small arctic town, the electrifying proximity of the world of animals, and ravishing world of myth, Tanya Tagaq explores a world where the distinctions between good and evil, animal and human, victim and transgressor, real and imagined lose their meaning, but the guiding power of love remains.
Haunting, brooding, exhilarating, and tender all at once, Tagaq moves effortlessly between fiction and memoir, myth and reality, poetry and prose, and conjures a world and a heroine readers will never forget.
The youngest of four children and the only girl, Vi was given a name that meant “precious, tiny one,” destined to be cosseted and protected, the family’s little treasure.
Daughter of an enterprising mother and a wealthy and spoiled father who never had to grow up, the Vietnam war tears their family asunder. While Vi and many of her family members escape, her father stays behind, and her family must fend for themselves in Canada.
While her mother and brothers put down roots, life has different plans for Vi. As a young woman, she finds the world opening up to her. Taken under the wing of Ha, a worldly family friend and diplomat lover, Vi tests personal boundaries and crosses international ones, letting the winds of life buffet her. From Saigon to Montreal, from Suzhou to Boston to the fall of the Berlin Wall, she is witness to the immensity of the world, the intricate fabric of humanity, the complexity of love, the infinite possibilities before her. Ever the quiet observer, somehow she must find a way to finally take her place in the world.
“You’re gonna need a rock and a whole lotta medicine” is a mantra that Jonny Appleseed, a young Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer, repeats to himself in this vivid and utterly compelling novel. Off the reserve and trying to find ways to live and love in the big city, Jonny becomes a cybersex worker who fetishizes himself in order to make a living. Self-ordained as an NDN glitter princess, Jonny has one week before he must return to the “rez,” and his former life, to attend the funeral of his stepfather. The next seven days are like a fevered dream: stories of love, trauma, sex, kinship, ambition, and the heartbreaking recollection of his beloved kokum (grandmother). Jonny’s world is a series of breakages, appendages, and linkages–and as he goes through the motions of preparing to return home, he learns how to put together the pieces of his life. Jonny Appleseed is a unique, shattering vision of Indigenous life, full of grit, glitter, and dreams.
I wasn’t surprised to see Washington Black on the list at all. I was, however, surprised not to see these novels there:
Warlight seemed to be a shoo-in for this award, given that Michael Ondaatje is a legend here in Canada, and that it was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize (along with Washington Black). I have heard that he may have removed himself from the running, however, which would explain its absence. Women Talking has been receiving a lot of attention on its own merits since publication, and I’ve heard more people talking about it than I initially expected. And Rachel Cusk’s novel Kudos has also received a lot of positive feedback, as well as being the third in her Outline trilogy, the second of which, Transit, was on last year’s Scotiabank Giller shortlist.
I also thought one of this year’s Canada Reads contenders might have sneaked in:
Of the books on this list, I’d heard of nine and had five already on my TBR. These were:
I’ve also added most of the others to my list, though I hope to get through some of the ones I’m most excited and give the rest a try. I think the only ones I’m a little unsure about are:
I’m not generally big on short story collections. There are two on this year’s list – Zolitude and Something for Everyone. I’ve heard brilliant things about Lisa Moore so I’m more inclined to give hers a go before moving on to Zolitude. I’m excited to see Joshua Whitehead’s book on the list, but I’ve heard mixed things about it, so I’m going into it with a little bit of hesitation since I’m not quite sure what to expect.
Overall I’m excited about the selections on the list, and looking forward to giving most of them a try. I’m actually a little bit more excited about this longlist than the Man Booker this year, if I’m honest!
I’d love to hear from you guys if you are planning to pick up any of the books on the longlist, or, even better, if you’ve already read them! If you haven’t heard of most of these titles before, has this prize nomination piqued your interest? Do you think you’ll give any a try? Share any thoughts you have on the prize and the longlist in the comments!