Everything You Need To Know About This Year’s Giller Prize

Date November 7, 2016

For so many publishers and authors, The Giller Awards are one of the biggest nights of the year. When a certain author wins the Giller—a $100,000 bursary—their profile is immediately boosted and their book often becomes a bestseller. The novels that were up for the prize this year all reflect Canada and the rest of the world in a fresh way. Here is a quick primer on the Giller winner and the main contenders:

Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien

Madeleine Thien, a 42-year-old Montreal writer who was recently awarded a Governor General’s fiction prize for her breakout novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing won the prize on Monday November 7. Her book tells the tale of a young woman called Ai-Ming, an exquisite personality who has fled China in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square protests. The main plot of Thien’s novel deals with Ai-Ming’s personal experience growing up in and outside of Revolutionary China.

giller-prize-2016-05 — photography courtesy of scotiabank giller prize

Yiddish for Pirates by Gary Barwin
Barwin has 19 books to his name but Yiddish for Pirates is one of his most exciting in tone and in plot. It tells the story of a 14-year-old Jewish boy who flees his shtetl in Vilnius in search of adventure on the high seas

PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE

13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl by Mona Awad
Mona Awad tackles body image in a novel about a young woman who can’t shake off the all-prevailing dark cloud of insecurity that surrounds her in her hometown in Mississauga. Although it sounds supremely serious and has a great deal of poignant moments in it, the book is also extremely funny.

The Best Kind of People by Zoe Whittal
FASHION’s own contributor, Zoe Whittal, has written a family drama that is bound to be optioned for a film. This Giller-nom-ed novel is about what happens to a family when one of its members and a community leader (in this case, it is the clan’s Dad, a prep school teacher named George Woodbury) is arrested for sexual assault

giller-prize-2016-06 — PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE

The Party Wall by Catherine Leroux
Montreal’s Catherine Leroux has written a page turner for the times, using four siblings to tell a tale that jumps from dissimilar places as far ranging as Montreal, Ottawa, Tijuana, San Francisco, rural Saskatchewan and coastal New Brunswick. The heart of this book is the relationships between the siblings and how life has changed the way they communicate with each other.

giller-prize-2016-04 — PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE

The Wonder by Emma Donoghue
The author of Room strikes back with another disturbing tale that digs deep into a small town in the Irish midlands in 1859. In this isolated place, an 11-year-old girl has defiantly gone without eating a bite for four months. An English nurse named Lib Wright shows up to help assess the situation and Wright’s life becomes changed by the connection in ways she could never imagine.