Congratulations to the five shortlist finalists of the 2024 Giller Prize! Thanks to the support of The Scotiabank Giller Prize, we are excited to announce the shortlisted titles are available in accessible formats to readers with print disabilities through the National Network for Equitable Library Service (NNELS), on the same day that they are announced across the country.
“For more than three decades, the Giller Prize has helped bring ideas to life by celebrating Canadian fiction and has inspired generations of writers to put pen to paper and share their creativity with the world. This year is no different; the five titles on the shortlist are exceptional works of art that inhabit entire worlds and reflect them back to us, granting us a much-needed pause to meditate about preconceived notions, ideas and the status quo.” – Elana Rabinovitch, Executive Director, Giller Prize.
You can find all the nominees in our Giller Prize 2024 collection, or browser nominees from previous years: 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023.
The 2024 Giller Prize Shortlist
The following are the titles for the 2024 shortlist:
Éric Chacour for his novel What I Know About You (translated by Pablo Strauss), published by Coach House Books
Please request this book from your local public library. If you can't find it, please contact us.
As a boy in 1960s Cairo, Tarek knows that his entire life is written in advance. He’ll be a doctor like his father, marry, and have children. Under the watchful eyes of his mother and his sister, he starts to do just that – until Ali enters his life and turns it upside down. The two men, from very different worlds, embark on an unsayable relationship that threatens to tear apart Tarek’s family. Years later, as Tarek is living a solitary life in Montreal, someone starts writing about him and to him, piecing together a past he wants only to forget. But who is the writer of this tale? And will he figure it out in time?
Anne Fleming for her novel Curiosities, published by Knopf Canada
This title is available through NNELS in EPUB3, MP3 and DAISY Audio formats.
A thrilling literary-historical novel with a modern twist, in the vein of Fingersmith by Sarah Waters and Fayne by Ann-Marie MacDonald. Curiosity begins when a present-day historian discovers a cache of five seventeenth-century manuscripts that each, astonishingly, tells the same strange story from vastly different points of view. The five manuscripts (which become the five parts of the novel) spin this tale: after the plague descends upon a village in England, two children, Joan and Thomasina, are the only survivors. They bond tightly with each other and with a mute woman living in a field nearby, who discovers and cares for them. When people return, the woman, as the lone adult alive, is accused of witchcraft, and the children are separated. Joan becomes a maid in the local manor house, and eventually, through her intelligence and skill, companion to the fascinating Lady Margaret Long. Thomasina, taken on a voyage to Virginia, decides to adopt boy's clothing and navigate life as a man named Tom. Tom and Joan find each other again as adults and fall in love, but are discovered together, naked, by young clergyman John Heard. Shocked and horrified, he believes in only one explanation for Tom's state: Joan must be a witch. Tom, trying to save both himself and Joan, runs as far away as he can, taking a position aboard an expedition through the Northwest Passage. The modern historian pieces together the interlocking stories of all five manuscripts and adds her own layer of "truth" to a history and time period where labels for who Tom and Joan might truly be, didn't yet exist. Curiosity is a compulsively readable novel, at the heart of which are characters who are utterly charming and whose journeys you'll feel deeply connected to.
Conor Kerr for his novel Prairie Edge, published by Strange Light
This title is available through NNELS in EPUB3, MP3 and DAISY Audio formats.
Meet Isidore "Ezzy" Desjarlais and Grey Ginther: two distant M{acute}etis cousins making the most of Grey's uncle's old trailer, passing their days playing endless games of cribbage and cracking cans of cheap beer in between. Grey, once a passionate advocate for change, has been hardened and turned cynical by an activist culture she thinks has turned performative and lazy. One night, though, she has a revelation, and enlists Ezzy, who is hopelessly devoted to her but eager to avoid the authorities after a life in and out of the group home system and jail, for a bold yet dangerous political mission: capture a herd of bison from a national park and set them free in downtown Edmonton, disrupting the churn of settler routine. But as Grey becomes increasingly single-minded in her newfound calling, their act of protest puts the pair and those close to them in peril, with devastating and sometimes fatal consequences. For readers drawn to the electric storytelling of Morgan Talty and the taut register of Stephen Graham Jones, Conor Kerr's Prairie Edge is at once a gripping, darkly funny caper and a raw reckoning with the wounds that persist across generations
Anne Michaels for her novel Held, published by McClelland & Stewart
This title is available through NNELS in EPUB3, MP3 and DAISY Audio formats.
A breathtaking and ineffable new novel from the author of the international best sellers Fugitive Pieces and The Winter Vault-a novel of love and loyalty across generations, at once sweeping and intimate. 1917. On a battlefield near the River Aisne, John lies in the aftermath of a blast, unable to move or feel his legs. Struggling to focus his thoughts, he is lost to memory as the snow falls-a chance encounter in a pub by a railway, a hot bath with his lover on a winter night. 1920. John has returned from war to North Yorkshire, near a different river. He is alive but still not whole. Reunited with Helena, an artist, he reopens his photography business and tries to keep on living. But the past erupts insistently into the present, as ghosts begin to surface in his pictures: ghosts with messages he cannot understand. So begins a narrative that spans four generations of connections and consequences that ignite and re-ignite as the century unfolds. In luminous moments of desire, comprehension, longing, and transcendence, the sparks fly upward, working their transformations decades later. Held is affecting and intensely beautiful, full of mystery, wisdom, and compassion, a novel by a writer at the height of her powers.
Deepa Rajagopalan for her short story collection Peacocks of Instagram, published by House of Anansi Press
This title is available through NNELS in EPUB3 format.
In these brilliant and witty stories, Deepa Rajagopalan centres a cast of Indian women who are flawed, enterprising, and filled with desire. In the award-winning title story, an underappreciated server in a coffee shop attracts tens of thousands of followers on social media with her peacock accessories. A hotel housekeeper up against a world of gender and class inequality quietly gets revenge on her chauvinist boss. A young woman navigates the landscape of loneliness after abruptly leaving her home in India by learning to drive over it. An eight-year-old finds her entire life uprooted when her mother needs a new kidney. A fiercely independent engineer does not decamp to the sidelines of an affair but takes up space, living her life as variously as possible. Peacocks of Instagram deftly questions what it means to be safe, to survive, and to call a place home. With an intense awareness of privilege and the lack of it, these fourteen subtle and affecting stories explore and indulge in the imperfection of the human condition.
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This year’s jury, made up of Canadian authors Kevin Chong and Noah Richler (jury chair), and Canadian singer-songwriter Molly Johnson narrowed down more than 100 submitted works to curate a shortlist that will enrich readers and future generations of writers. Rakuten Kobo provided the jury with Kobo Libra 2 eReaders to support them on their reading journey.
Read the jury citations about each of the shortlisted authors.
The ceremony honoring the finalists and announcing the winner will be broadcast on CBC and CBC Gem on November 18, 2024 at 9 p.m. (11:30 p.m. AT, 12 a.m. NT), and on CBC Radio One and CBC Listen at 9 p.m. (10 AT, 10:30 NT).
About the Scotiabank Giller Prize: The Scotiabank Giller Prize strives to highlight the very best in Canadian fiction year after year. The prize awards $100,000 annually to the author of the best Canadian novel or short story collection published in English and $10,000 to each of the finalists. The award is named in honour of the late literary journalist Doris Giller and was founded in 1994 by her husband, Toronto businessman Jack Rabinovitch. Visit us at www.scotiabankgillerprize.ca
Media Inquiries: gillerprizemedia@thetarogroup.com