Clockwise from top left: Anne Michaels, Conor Kerr, Eric Chacour, Anne Fleming and Deepa Rajagopalan. The five writers were named as finalists for this year's Giller Prize.Supplied
Toronto poet-novelist Anne Michaels is on a roll. Her four-generation saga Held has landed on the short list for the $100,000 Giller Prize, one month after the novel was named as a finalist for the prestigious London-based Booker Prize.
The other finalists vying for the Giller, Canada’s glitziest literary prize, are British Columbia’s Anne Fleming, for her novel Curiosities; Montreal’s Éric Chacour, for his novel What I Know About You; Edmonton’s Conor Kerr, for his novel Prairie Edge; and Toronto-based Deepa Rajagopalan, for her short story collection Peacocks of Instagram.
Both Kerr’s Prairie Edge and Chacour’s What I Know About You are also in contention for the $60,000 Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.
Michaels has been a Giller shortlister twice before, in 1996 for Fugitive Pieces and in 2009 for The Winter Vault. The other four contenders are new names to the final five.
Another new name is the title of the prize itself. Established in 1994 by Toronto businessman Jack Rabinovitch, the award had been known as the Scotiabank Giller Prize since 2005. The Canadian bank remains as the lead sponsor, but its name was dropped from the prize a month ago.
The rebranding was in response to a whirlwind of controversy that first rocked the Giller at last year’s televised ceremony, which was briefly interrupted by anti-Israel protesters who jumped onstage carrying signs that read “Scotiabank Funds Genocide.” The activists took issue with a Bank of Nova Scotia subsidiary’s stake in Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems.
Since then, 37 authors signed a letter saying they had asked their publishers not to submit their eligible books for consideration this year in protest of the Scotiabank sponsorship. Previous winners David Bergen, Omar El Akkad and last year’s prize taker, Sarah Bernstein, made it be known they would refuse participation in all Giller programming or promotions.
In a statement to The Globe and Mail, the prize’s executive director, Elana Rabinovitch, said that while the Giller Foundation “respects the rights of authors to speak out and engage on social issues,” the foundation “would remain focused on celebrating and promoting the excellence of Canadian writers and the publishing sector that supports the work of these authors.”
This summer, Indian novelist Megha Majumdar and Ethiopian-American author Dinaw Mengestu withdrew from the five-person panel of judges for this year’s Giller over its decision to stay with Scotiabank.
The remaining three jury members, all Canadians, are author Kevin Chong, singer Molly Johnson and the jury chair, author-broadcaster Noah Richler. They cited Michaels’s Held, which begins with an injured man on a First World War battlefield, as a novel that floats – “a beguiling association of memories, projections and haunted instances …”
Chacour’s What I Know About You, a love story that moves between Egypt and Montreal, was thought to be “quiet” and “touching.” The jury found the 14 stories about diasporic Indians in Rajagopalan’s Peacocks of Instagram to be “utterly absorbing, often hilarious.”
Kerr’s Prairie Edge, a contemporary caper featuring two cribbage-playing Métis cousins, is a “propulsive crime narrative built around successive, compounding blunders and a work of literary art.” Finally, the jury cited Fleming’s novel Curiosities, involving a series of 17th-century manuscripts and an amateur historian, as a “captivating story of hope, change, and belonging.”
The Giller Prize winner will be announced on Nov. 18.