Anne Michaels, Conor Kerr among finalists for 2024 Giller Prize

Éric Chacour, Anne Fleming, Conor Kerr, Anne Michaels and Deepa Rajagopalan are the five writers shortlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize. 

The $100,000 award annually recognizes the best in Canadian fiction. 

The 2024 short list features four novels and one short story collection, covering a wide range of material, from South Asian diaspora experiences to queer historical romance to contemporary Métis stories. 

It includes two writers with debut books: Chacour for What I Know About You, translated by Pablo Strauss, and Rajagopalan for Peacocks of Instagram.

All finalists but Michaels are making their first appearance on the Giller shortlist. 

Michaels, recognized this year for Held, was shortlisted for the 1996 Giller Prize for Fugitive Pieces and in 2009 for The Winter Vault. Kerr, who is shortlisted for Prairie Edge, was previously longlisted in 2022 for his novel Avenue of Champions. 

Kerr is also one of the 2025 judges for the CBC Short Story Prize.

The shortlisted books are available in accessible format through the National Network for Equitable Library Services and the Centre for Equitable Library Access. 

The shortlist was chosen from more than 100 books by a jury chaired by author and producer Noah Richler and included 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.”

Pushback from some authors

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

Scotiabank had 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 when the long list was announced. “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 2024 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; 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 five shortlisted books below. 

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. 

Pablo 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. 

Curiosities 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, navigates the world in boy’s clothes and as a male, but faces a struggle when discovered, naked, by a member of the clergy. 

Fleming is an author based in Victoria. 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. She has also written a 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 has lived in a number of 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.

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 thought and John is haunted by ghosts that begin to surface in his photos with messages he struggles to decipher.

Held is also shortlisted 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 Giller Prize. 

The collection of stories in Peacocks of Instagram provides 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 everything.

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.