The shortlist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, Canada’s richest prize for fiction, was announced Tuesday morning in Toronto. The finalists are: David Bezmozgis The Free World (HarperCollins Canada); Michael Ondaatje The Cat’s Table (McClelland & Stewart);
Lynn Coady The Antagonist (House of Anansi Press); Zsuzsi Gartner Better Living Through Plastic Explosives (Penguin Group Canada); Patrick deWitt The Sisters Brothers (House of Anansi Press); and Esi Edugyan Half-Blood Blues (Thomas Allen Publishers)
Two of the books, deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers and Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues, have also been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
The prize will be awarded on November 8 with C$50,000 going to the winner and C$5,000 going to each of finalists. The gala awards ceremony will be televised across Canada on CBC.
This year’s jury is Canadian writer Annabel Lyon, American author Howard Norman, and U.K. novelist and playwright Andrew O’Hagan. They reviewed 143 books from 55 publishers and selected this shortlist from a longlist of 16 books.
