In just a few days, one Canadian author will be chosen as the winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize – the biggest award in the country’s literary fiction scene with $100,000 to the winning writer.
This year’s shortlist of novel and short story authors is a diverse and talented group, and the settings and themes featured in their nominated works reflect that. The shortlisted books explore everything from American identity politics to colonization and displacement to racism and homophobia.
Ahead of the winner announcement on Nov. 7, Perspectives asked each author the same set of questions, such as what book changed their lives and when they knew they wanted to become writers.
Click on the names below to read their answers and get to know the nominees:
- Kim Fu for her short story collection, Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century
- Rawi Hage for his short story collection Stray Dogs
- Tsering Yangzom Lama for her novel We Measure the Earth With Our Bodies
- Suzette Mayr for her novel, The Sleeping Car Porter
- Noor Naga for her novel, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English
Nominated work: Short story collection Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, published by Coach House Books
What's the one thing you hope people take away after reading your book?
While the book is sometimes harsh or unsettling—and readers have told me as much—I hope that many of the stories offer a kind of solidarity or commiseration for the apocalyptic feelings that are a big part of life right now. I hope there’s comfort and even humour in seeing those feelings named, reflected, and amplified, and that it makes people feel less alone.
What book changed your life and why?
I can’t pick just one. There’s at least one a year! 2021: Craft in the Real World by Matthew Salesses made me rethink everything I thought I knew about writing, teaching, and my taste as a reader. 2019: An Image in the Mirror by Ijangolet S. Ogwang, a novel I strongly associate with learning to experience my life with gratitude, more conscious of the sacrifices others make for their art. 2016: The Fortunes by Peter Ho Davies was the culmination of a new understanding of my racialized experience that made me feel freer and bolder as a writer. 2012: In Say Her Name by Francisco Goldman, I found the raw, ugly howl of my own grief after my father died.
When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
From before I can remember, from the time I was a small child. As soon as I could read, I wanted to write my own stories and poems. I bound together little books of my writing, making covers from cut-up cereal boxes. I made a newspaper about the goings-on of my household and tried to charge my sisters a quarter for it. My family (understandably) thought this was hilarious, but it was deathly serious to me.
What would winning this award mean for you?
I almost can’t imagine it. It would be the biggest accolade of my career, without question. There are so many people without whom this book wouldn't exist—not just the wonderful people at my publishers and agency, but my family, my partner, my writer friends, the community that supported me every day I was working on it. People who will be at home watching and cheering me on. I would be so excited to share the news with them. I’d need to take a lot of people out for dinner. Above all, it would mean time to write, the most valuable thing in the world.
How many books have you read this year?
45
Canadian author you most want an autograph from?
Kate Beaton
Best movie based on a book? The worst?
Best: I love a Charlie Kaufman take—Adaptation, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, I’m Thinking of Ending Things (Iain Reid, a Canadian!). Worst: …The Hobbit?
Do you prefer hardcover, paperback, electronic or audiobooks?
Paperback
Top 3 books?
The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier, Exhalation by Ted Chiang, Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich (subject to frequent, almost daily change).
Top 3 Canadian authors?
Alice Munro, Dionne Brand, all the friends who will be mad that I didn’t name them.
Nominated work: Short-story collection Stray Dogs, published by Knopf Canada, an imprint of Penguin Random House Canada
What's the one thing you hope people take away after reading your book?
Joy.
What book changed your life and why?
Crime and Punishment.
When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
I tried many jobs in my life and had many interests. I was very interested in photography, but at some point I noticed that I needed to tell a longer story. So I started with a short story.
What would winning this award mean for you?
Acknowledgement from my peers and great writers.
How many books have you read this year?
An average of a book a week.
Canadian author you most want an autograph from?
Madeleine Thien
Best movie based on a book?
The Conformist. The film is based on a book by the Italian writer Alberto Moravia. It takes place during the early rise of fascism in Italy and the beginning of a wave of assassinations of intellectuals and those in political opposition. Moravia was critical of the conformist elements in that movement.
Do you prefer hard cover, paperback, electronic or audiobooks?
Paperback. As a reader, I like the physical book. I like to have a sense of my progress, and how many pages I am into the book. I like to have a sense of the writer’s pacing on the page, too. I also like the texture of the physical book, and with the paperback, in particular, the book’s willingness to integrate elements from its surroundings—such as coffee stains and other incidentals of life.
Top 3 books?
I just can’t put books in a hierarchy. They (and we) are more complex than that.
Top 3 Canadian authors?
See above.
Nominated work: Novel We Measure the Earth With Our Bodies, published by McClelland & Stewart, an imprint of Penguin Random House Canada
One thing you hope people will take away after reading your book?
I want my readers to get an intimate sense of the scale and depth of the historical catastrophe that Tibetans have faced in the last half century. How we continue to resist and survive ongoing colonization, displacement, and exile. And I want this understanding to come from the everyday experiences of ordinary Tibetans, which is the focus of my novel. How we love, how we grieve, how we are connected to our past, and how we dream of what’s yet to come.
What book changed your life and why?
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger was one of the first novels I chose to read for pleasure as a teenager. For a few years, after immigrating to Canada, I lost my love of reading. That novel reignited the love of stories that I had as a child growing up in Nepal.
When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
When I was eight or nine, living in Nepal and still learning English, I bought my first diary. A little blue book that I would fill with my basic English sentences every day. I had written then that I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. Many years later, in my second year studying at UBC, I found my old diary and was surprised that I had once dreamed of being a writer. I was studying toward a double major in Philosophy and International Relations at the time. I enrolled in an elective creative writing course, and just kept taking more courses. I never stopped writing after that.
What would winning this award mean for you?
I have resisted the impulse to think about this. Even being a finalist for the Giller is an immense turn of good fortune for any writer. I just can’t allow myself to imagine anything further for I have been given a great deal already.
How many books have you read this year?
Too few. Maybe in the high twenties or low thirties? This year has been a whirlwind of doing many things besides reading and writing.
Canadian author you most want an autograph from?
I don’t collect autographs! But I suppose if I could speak with anyone it might be Joy Kogawa.
Best move based on a book? The worst?
“My Brilliant Friend” series on HBO (based on Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels) is fantastic. The worst? I feel like no one has really captured The Beauty and the Beast effectively on film.
Do you prefer hard cover etc.?
I prefer paperback. They’re lighter, smaller, and flexible.
Top 3 books?
Waiting for the Barbarians by JM Coetzee. Beloved by Toni Morrison. All About Love by bell hooks.
Top 3 Canadian authors?
Paige Cooper. Anakana Schoefield. Michael Ondaatje. But the list goes on…!
Nominated work: Novel The Sleeping Car Porter, published by Coach House Books
What's the one thing you hope people take away after reading your book?
That people who work in the service industry deserve respect and politeness. Also that sleeping car porters and the communities that supported them are an essential part of Canadian history, and we need to know more about them.
What book changed your life and why?
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie was a huge influence for me in terms of my writing life. I’d never read anything like it: the voice, the form, the irreverence while dealing with a really important and heavy topic. There’s a section where the main character Saleem has a fever dream, and there is such poetry in that moment and in the writing. I had never seen language so intense and so beautiful. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein also rocked my world, once again because of the writer’s completely different sense of language, and because of the obvious devotion Stein was showing toward Toklas but not in a conventional way.
When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
There’s a big difference for me between being a “writer” and “being a person who writes.” I never wanted to be a “writer” because it just sounded too difficult and a little bit pretentious and boring. But I wanted to be “a person who writes” when I was probably in my late teens and in my first couple of years of university. There were things happening to me and moments of revelation that I desperately wanted some record of, and writing was the way to take snapshots and recordings of those moments. Writing was a way of processing the world.
What would winning this award mean for you?
I can’t even begin to fathom what it would mean, really. I know it would be a major form of validation, and I think it would give me permission to not be so hard on myself as a writer. I’d be able to more firmly close the door on negative thoughts about my skill and worth as a writer.
How many books have you read this year?
12?
Canadian author you most want an autograph from?
Do they have to be alive? If not, then Marie-Claire Blais or Leonard Cohen. Or Lucy Maud Montgomery, but I’d want her to sign a copy of her short stories Among the Shadows: Tales from the Darker Side. That would be so cool.
Best movie based on a book? The worst?
The best: Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is pretty amazing and fixes some problems in the book. The worst: The recent Netflix series inspired by Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. Holy smokes, the last few episodes are terrible.
Do you prefer hardcover, paperback, electronic or audiobooks?
Paperback.
Top 3 books?
Beloved by Toni Morrison, Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh. Can I have a fourth? Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston.
Top 3 Canadian authors?
Jillian Tamaki, Carol Shields, André Alexis.
Nominated work: Novel If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English, published by Graywolf Press
What's the one thing you hope people take away after reading your book?
Suspicion. I hope they are inspired to think about the artifice of all texts, but especially those looted from their native environment, carried across fantastic distances and then presented to an Anglophone audience.
What book changed your life and why?
The short-story collection Tender by Sofia Samatar destroyed so many of the preconceptions I had about structure, point of view and genre. I very rarely come across short stories that are so playfully irreverent and formally experimental, full of corners that you turn to find something stranger still. “An Account of the Land of Witches” was particularly formative for me, and I still return to it regularly to remind myself of how much is permissible.
When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
When I was a teenager someone I loved told me I was a writer. I wanted her to be right.
What would winning this award mean for you?
I’ve told my parents I may never get married, but winning the Giller might be the closest thing to a wedding. They are flying in especially to attend the ceremony and it would mean a lot to make them proud.
How many books have you read this year?
A gentleman doesn’t kiss and tell.
Canadian author you most want an autograph from?
Michael Ondaatje.
Best movie based on a book? The worst?
I thought The Life of Pi was surprisingly beautiful as an adaptation.
Do you prefer hard cover, paperback, electronic or audiobooks?
Paperback
Top 3 books?
Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih, Beer in the Snooker Club by Waguih Ghali and probably Coming through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje.
Top 3 Canadian authors?
Michael Ondaatje, Anne Carson, Anne Michaels.
