Winnipeg’s katherena vermette among 12 authors on longlist for $100K Giller Prize

Twelve writers have been longlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize. The $100,000 award annually recognizes the best in Canadian fiction. 

The 2024 longlist features nine novels and three short story collections that include a wide range of material, from South Asian diaspora experiences to queer historical romance and contemporary Métis stories. 

It includes four writers for their debut books and six writers who have previously been recognized by the prize.

The debut writers are Éric Chacour for What I Know About You, translated by Pablo Strauss, Corinna Chong for Bad Land, Loghan Paylor for The Cure for Drowning and Deepa Rajagopalan for Peacocks of Instagram.

Caroline Adderson is longlisted for A Way to Be Happy and was also longlisted in 2006 for Pleased to Meet You. Conor Kerr, who is longlisted for Prairie Edge, was longlisted in 2022 for his novel Avenue of Champions. Claire Messud, who is on the longlist for This Strange Eventful History, was on the 2013 longlist for The Woman Upstairs.

Anne Michaels, recognized this year for Held, was shortlisted for the 1996 Giller Prize for Fugitive Pieces and in 2009 for The Winter Vault. Jane Urquhart is longlisted for In Winter I Get Up at Night and was nominated for the 2001 prize for The Stone Carvers and longlisted in 2010 for Sanctuary Line. katherna vermette, longlisted for real ones, made the 2021 longlist for The Strangers.

Three of the authors have connections to the CBC Literary Prizes. Adderson is a three-time CBC Literary Prizes winner, Chong won the 2021 CBC Short Story Prize and Kerr was longlisted for the 2021 CBC Poetry Prize.

Here is the full 2024 longlist:

The longlist was chosen from over 100 books submitted by Canadian publishers. 

In July, more than 20 authors pulled their books from consideration for the prize, which is sponsored by Scotiabank, to protest Scotiabank’s investment in Elbit Systems, an Israeli defence contractor. The letter demands the Giller Foundation pressure Scotiabank to fully divest from Elbit Systems. As of the longlist announcement, 45 authors have signed the letter.

Scotiabank has since reduced its holdings in Elbit Systems by more than two-thirds as of Aug. 14, according to the Canadian Press.

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. “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 jury is chaired by author and producer Noah Richler and includes 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.

“Writers of fiction imagine, as a matter of course, what it means to be another: to be marginalized, to be suppressed, to be guilty — to be joyful! — or simply not seen,” said the jury in a press statement. “Their words sing lives, extol our virtues, nurse our injuries, expose our faults, and compel us to consider worlds about which we are curious and unknowing or had no idea existed.”

“It is the profound belief in our common humanity writers share that makes this possible, a conviction never more important than in fractious times such as we are living today, and brilliantly on display in the concerns and stories of these twelve exceptional Canadian authors. The worlds they thrillingly put within readers’ reach scan centuries, cultures, divides; they are sometimes beautiful and sometimes traumatic, but always richly conveyed and ardently felt.”

The 2024 shortlist will be announced on Oct. 9 and the winner will be announced on Nov. 18, 2024. 

The 2024 Giller Prize award ceremony will be broadcast on Monday, Nov. 18, at 9 p.m. ET (11:30 p.m. AT, 12 a.m. NT) on CBC TV and CBC Gem, with a livestream also available at 9 p.m. ET on CBC’s YouTube channel. It will also be broadcast on CBC Radio One and CBC Listen.

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, Omar El Akkad for What Strange Paradise, 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, Alice Munro for Runaway, 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 12 longlisted books below. 

A Way to Be Happy is a short story collection that follows various characters as they try to find happiness. Ranging from mundane to extraordinary, the stories feature everything from a pair of addicts robbing parties to fund their sobriety to a Russian hitman dealing with an illness and reliving his past. 

Adderson is the Vancouver-based author of five novels, including The Sky is Falling, Ellen in Pieces and A Russian Sister. She has also published two short story collections, including the 1993 Governor General’s Literary Award finalist Bad Imaginings. Adderson’s awards include three B.C. Book Prizes, a National Magazine Award Gold Medal for Fiction. She has received the 2006 Marian Engel Award for mid-career achievement. She is also a three-time winner of the CBC Literary Prizes.

Death by a Thousand Cuts traces the funny, honest and difficult parts of womanhood. From a writer whose ex published a book about their breakup to the confession wrought by a Reddit post, these stories probe rage, loneliness, bodily autonomy and these women’s relationships with themselves just as much as those around them. 

Bhat’s previous work includes The Family Took Shape, a finalist for the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award and The Most Precious Substance on Earth, which was also a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction in 2022. Her short stories won the Writers’ Trust/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize and she has been shortlisted for a National Magazine Award and the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. Bhat lives in New Westminster, B.C. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

In Bad Land, Regina’s brother shows up on her doorstep with his six-year-old daughter after seven years, interrupting her quiet loner life. The longer they stay, the clearer it becomes to Regina that something terrible has happened — and once the secret is revealed, they’re sent on a fraught journey from Alberta to the coast of B.C. 

Originally from Calgary, Chong lives in Kelowna, B.C. and teaches English and fine arts at Okanagan College. She published her first novel, Belinda’s Rings, in 2013. In 2023, she published the short story collection The Whole Animal which includes Kids in Kindergarten, the winner of the 2021 CBC Short Story Prize. 

Curiosities is a novel that 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, navigating the world in boy’s clothes and as a male — and the struggles they face when they’re discovered, naked, by a member of the clergy. 

Fleming is an author based in Victoria, B.C. 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, and her middle-grade novel, The Goat, which was a Junior Library Guild and White Ravens selection.

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. 

Kerr is a Métis/Ukrainian writer who hails from many prairie towns and cities, including Saskatoon. He now lives in Edmonton. A 2022 CBC Books writer to watch, his previous works include the novels Old Gods and 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.

This Strange Eventful History follows a French Algerian family over seven decades, from 1940 to 2010. The book tells the story of the Cassars as they are separated in the Second World War, flee Algeria after it declares independence and try to build their lives elsewhere, with the social and political upheaval of their recent past fresh in their minds. As she grows up and wants to understand her family’s history, Chloe, the youngest member of the family, convinces her parents and grandparents that sharing this part of them will bring them peace. 

This Strange Eventful History is also longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. 

Messud is a Canadian American author with French Algerian roots. Her books include The Emperor’s Children, which was longlisted for the Booker in 2006, and When the World Was Steady and The Hunters, which were both finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award. She has won Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellowships and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Cambridge, Mass.

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. The past proves harder to escape than he once thought and John is haunted by ghosts that begin to surface in his photos with messages he struggles to decipher.

Held is also longlisted 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 Scotiabank Giller Prize. 

Kit McNair was born Kathleen to an Irish farming family in Ontario and, a tomboy in boy’s clothes, doesn’t fit in with the expectations of a farmgirl set out for them. When Rebekah, a German-Canadian doctor’s daughter comes to town, she, Kit and Kit’s older brother Landon find themselves in a love triangle which tears their families apart. All three of them separate and join different war efforts but all eventually return home — and they’ll have to move forward from their challenging and storied past. 

Paylor is an Ontario-born author currently based in Abbotsford, B.C. They have an MA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia and their short fiction and essays have previously appeared in publications including Room and Prairie Fire. The Cure for Drowning is their debut novel. 

The collection of stories in Peacocks of Instagram provide 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 all.

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.

In Winter I Get Up at Night tells the story of music teacher Emer McConnell who lives in rural Saskatchewan. One day, as she heads to work in the early morning, she takes a trip down memory lane, taking us on her life’s journey, from the prairie storm that left her in a children’s ward when she was 11 to family secrets and distant love affairs. 

Urquhart is a novelist and poet. In 2005, she was made an officer of the Order of Canada. In 1994, she received the Marian Engel Award, now known as Writers’ Trust Engel/Findley Award. Her debut, The Whirlpool, received Le prix du meilleur livre étranger (Best Foreign Book Award) in France. The 1993 speculative fiction novel Away won the Trillium Award, was a finalist for the prestigious International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and was a contender on Canada Reads 2013, when it was defended by Charlotte Gray. 

Following two Michif sisters, lyn and June, real ones examines what happens when their estranged and white mother gets called out as a pretendian — somebody who claims some Indigenous ancestry but is unable or unwilling to prove it. Going by the name Raven Bearclaw, she’s seen success for her art that draws on Indigenous style. As the media hones in on the story, the sisters, whose childhood trauma manifests in different ways, are pulled into their mother’s web of lies and the painful past resurfaces. 

vermette is a Métis writer from Winnipeg. Her books include the poetry collections North End Love Songs and river woman and the four-book graphic novel series A Girl Called Echo. Her novels are The Break, The Strangers, The Circle. North End Love Songs won the Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry. The Break was a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction. It was defended by Candy Palmater on Canada Reads 2017. The Strangers won the 2021 Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and was longlisted for the 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize.