Everything you need to know about the 5 finalists for the $100K Scotiabank Giller Prize
The winner will be revealed on Monday, Nov. 7, 2022
Books by Montreal's Rawi Hage, Calgary's Suzette Mayr, Egyptian Canadian writer Noor Naga, Washington-based Kim Fu and Vancouver's Tsering Yangzom Lama have been shortlisted for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize.
The $100,000 prize is the biggest in Canadian literature.
The winner will be revealed on Monday, Nov. 7, 2022.
The ceremony will be broadcast on CBC TV, CBC Gem, CBC Listen and CBC Radio at 9 p.m. local time (11:30 AT/12 midnight NT) and will be streamed online at CBC Books, YouTube and Facebook at 9 p.m. ET.
Artist, poet and performer Rupi Kaur returns to co-host the broadcast. Joining her this year is Canadian actor Sarah Gadon.
Last year's winner was Omar El Akkad for his novel What Strange Paradise.
Other past Giller Prize winners include 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 shortlisted books and authors below.
Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century by Kim Fu
In the short story collection Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, Kim Fu turns the familiar on its head to weave tales of new worlds where strange happenings, like a girl growing wings on her legs or toy boxes that control the passage of time, are the ordinary trappings of everyday life. The stories deal with themes of death, technological consequence, guilt and sexuality and unmask the contradictions within humanity.
"I've always loved short stories. You read them over a lunch hour or a bus ride. In that tiny space of time, you have the opportunity to be transported into a whole other world — and you have lived a whole lifetime with this character. You can have this very short experience that sticks with you for the rest of your life," Fu told CBC Books in an interview.
You can have this very short experience in this life that sticks with you for the rest of your life.- Kim Fu
"One of the things I like about books especially, but art more generally, is that your life is so small. You're trapped in this body and this one life we have and you get to expand your universe. You get to have experiences that you never would have otherwise. You get to see so much more of the world and what is possible. Short stories do that in this tight compact little form."
Fu is a Washington-based, Canadian-born fiction writer and poet. She has published two other works of fiction, For Today I Am a Boy and The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore, and a book of poetry, How Festive the Ambulance. Fu was named a writer to watch by CBC Books in 2022.
After I killed my wife, I had 20 hours before her new body finished printing downstairs. I thought about how to spend the time. I could clean the house, as a show of contrition, and when she returned to find me sitting at the shining kitchen island, knick-knacks in place on dusted shelves, a pot of soup on the stove, we might not even need to discuss it. I could buy flowers. I could watch the printing, which still fascinated me, the weaving and webbing of each layer of tissue, the cross-sectional view of her internal workings like the ringed sections of a tree trunk.
Giller Prize jury citation: "An endlessly surprising story collection without a single flawed entry in the bunch, Kim Fu's Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century is brilliantly textured. Moving from an argument with the operator of a VR machine to an insomniac's encounter with a veritable sandman to a couple who can die and resurrect themselves at will, Fu's worlds are fantastical and enterprising in their own right. But these set-ups stealthily reveal themselves to be structures for unspeakably moving revelations about the most real of human experiences — grief, anger, mistrust, sex, nostalgia, sacrifice. A deeply emotional collection that delights, dares and dazzles."
A deeply emotional collection that delights, dares and dazzles.- Giller Prize jury
LISTEN | Kim Fu discusses her surreal short stories with Shelagh Rogers:
Stray Dogs by Rawi Hage
The characters in the short story collection Stray Dogs are restless travellers, moving between nation states and states of mind, seeking connection and trying to escape the past. Set in Montreal, Beirut, Tokyo and more, these stories highlight the often random ways our fragile modern identities are constructed, destroyed and reborn.
"Most of the characters, they tend to be wanderers — maybe stray people. Also, I think that Stray People would be an adequate title. It's just about a certain non-belonging. Most are either wanderers in their own mind or wanderers geographically. Just like stray dogs, they tend not to have places to host them or take care of them," Hage said in an interview with The Next Chapter.
Just like stray dogs, they they tend not to have places to host them or take care of them.- Rawi Hage
"One of the characters, Samir, is like many people who left the Middle East from a certain generation. He's living in the States and encounters academia, photography, art, etc. His choice of studies is not approved by his family. They were expecting him to become an engineer or adhere to certain traditional conservative norms. But he strays and becomes an academic interested in photography. He was very attracted to the aesthetics of Japanese photography, which is a contrast between dark shadows and very bright light. It's very much about contrast.
"I think Samir made a comparison between his own culture, which tends to be, in his own perception, very gaudy, very flamboyant to a certain extent — and Japanese photography, which is all so austere. It's a complex story with many fragments to it. But there's also a theological discussion about the image and what the image represents in the Arabic culture."
Hage is a Montreal-based writer. His books include De Niro's Game, which won the International Dublin Literary Award in 2008; Cockroach, which received the Hugh MacLennan Prize for fiction, was defended by Samantha Bee on Canada Reads in 2014, and was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award; Carnival, which was a finalist for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize; and Beirut Hellfire Society, which was on the shortlist for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award for fiction.
In 2011, I was offered a writing residency in Berlin. I was given an apartment in Kreuzberg. I worked on a novel in the mornings and smoked outside on the balcony in the afternoons. Whenever I leaned on the edge of the balcony, I would see below me a street, a lamp and a garden. One day when I was out there, a woman standing in the garden waved at me. A moment later, her husband joined in. I waved back and nodded.
During the day, I spent a great deal of time alone, writing and reading. In the evening, it became my custom to join the couple in their garden for a beer or two.
Giller Prize jury citation: "The short stories in Rawi Hage's Stray Dogs fuse spare, graceful language with world-spanning design. Haunted by war and movement, families fragment and cultures stretch. As the characters cross borders in pursuit of careers and relationships, they are pulled back through fissures in memory. We follow academics and photographers to Montreal, Berlin and Tokyo, and yet those geographical distances can appear less vast than the cultural distance between a childhood in rural Lebanon and a privileged adulthood in Beirut. Just as travel is grounded by return, accomplishment is undercut by uncertainty, and urbane arrogance often rests on a foundation of humble circumstances. Movement is met with recurring meditations on the static images of photography. The writing is streamlined and confident, understated and wry. As the stories develop, we are confronted by their surprising, lifelike inevitability."
The short stories in Rawi Hage's Stray Dogs fuse spare, graceful language with world-spanning design.- Giller Prize jury
LISTEN | Rawi Hage discusses his short stories with Shelagh Rogers:
The Sleeping Car Porter by Suzette Mayr
The Sleeping Car Porter tells the story of Baxter, a Black man in 1929 who works as a sleeping-car porter on a train that travels across the country. He smiles and tries to be invisible to the passengers, but what he really wants is to save up and go to dentistry school. On one particular trip out west, the train is stalled and Baxter finds a naughty postcard of two gay men. The postcard reawakens his memories and longings and puts his job in jeopardy.
"It's really important that Black people become part of the fabric of the history of this country. It gets a little tiring when the only time you talk about it is in February, because it's Black History Month. It's every month. It's everywhere," Mayr said in an interview with CBC Books.
It's really important that Black people become part of the fabric of the history of this country.- Suzette Mayr
"This particular group worked really hard to get ahead. I'm not necessarily related to one of these porters, as far as I know, but they've paved the way for me in all kinds of ways.
"So Black history matters, every month of the year."
Mayr is a poet and novelist based in Calgary. She is the author of the novels Dr. Edith Vane and the Hares of Crawley Hall, Monoceros, Moon Honey, The Widows and Venous Hum. Monoceros won the ReLit Award, the City of Calgary W. O. Mitchell Book Prize and made the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist.
He delivers the pairs of shoes as he completes them, slides them back under curtained berths, opens the individual lockers and shoves them in, toes to the front, heels to the back.
He blacks boots, polishes, he buffs, he polishes again.
Edwin Drew once told him and a group of other student porters a story about how one time he collected all the shoes from a car full of passengers, and then when he went to return the shoes, saw that the passengers' car had uncoupled from the rest of the train when the train stopped at the last station, and that he now had a bag full of shoes and no passengers, and the passengers had no shoes.
Giller Prize jury citation: "Suzette Mayr brings to life — believably, achingly, thrillingly — a whole world contained in a passenger train moving across the Canadian vastness, nearly 100 years ago. As only occurs in the finest historical novels, every page in The Sleeping Car Porter feels alive and immediate — and eerily contemporary. The sleeping-car porter in this sleek, stylish novel is named R.T. Baxter — called George by the people upon whom he waits, as is every other Black porter. Baxter's dream of one day going to school to learn dentistry coexists with his secret life as a gay man, and in Mayr's triumphant novel we follow him not only from Montreal to Calgary, but into and out of the lives of an indelibly etched cast of supporting characters, and, finally, into a beautifully rendered radiance."
As only occurs in the finest historical novels, every page in The Sleeping Car Porter feels alive and immediate — and eerily contemporary.- Giller Prize jury
LISTEN | Suzette Mayr on what it's like being a finalist for the Giller Prize:
If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English by Noor Naga
Set shortly after the events of the Arab Spring, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English is a novel that traces the relationship between two people — a wealthy Egyptian American woman and an unemployed man from the village of Shobrakheit — who meet in a cafe in Cairo. The pair fall in love but must contend with issues of identity, class and violence as they try to build a lasting relationship.
"The main unnamed character doesn't have the stereotypical immigrant story of struggling parents. Her parents are working professionals, they have a lot of money, they're very comfortable. And yet, she's constantly trying to find ways to to minimize that power and maximize all the ways in which she might be a subject of racism or Islamophobia," Noor said in an interview on The Next Chapter.
What it means to be a minority in Egypt looks very different. Class is really the biggest defining marker.- Noor Naga
"So coming back to Cairo, all of that crumbles into the ground — very, very quickly — because this is not the reality. What it means to be a minority in Egypt looks very different. Class is really the biggest defining marker.
"If you're somebody who has lived all your life in the U.S., then you are upper class — that's a fact of your life and [Egyptian] people are very good at reading that."
Naga is an Egyptian Canadian writer. She won the 2017 Bronwen Wallace Award for her poem The Mistress and the Ping. She also won the Disquiet Fiction Prize in 2019. In 2020, Noor was named a writer to watch by CBC Books in 2020. Her first book, the poetry collection Washes, Prays, was published in 2020 and was named among the best poetry of the year by CBC Books. Noor is an instructor at the American University in Cairo.
He told me he was from a village, Shobrakheit. He told me a New Yorker and a Cairene have more in common than a Cairene and a man from Shobrakheit, but he would not tell me what the commonalities were. Instead he asked if I had ever ridden a microbes, and I was forced to say no. What about a tuktuk? Another no. And then I remembered that when we'd stopped at the kiosk for cigarettes, he had bought singles. I looked and seemed to see him for the first time: the hems of his pants were frayed, strings dangled from his vest like lines of saliva, yet he wore a perky bow tie. He wore black leather sandals with socks, but one of the soles was loose, flapping like a bottom lip when he walked. I didn't know then: every night before bed he washes his feet and socks in the sink, wrings the blackness out of both. Hangs the socks on the bathroom door handle to dry for the morning. Only pair he has. He washes his socks every night but he has never brushed his teeth with toothpaste or shampooed his hair. Does not own deodorant. If he showed a little more ideology, he could be considered woke— some kind of minimalist, an ecofreak. How to say consumerism in Arabic? How to say toxins, microplastics, mutagenics, fair trade, ethical sourcing? But the boy from Shobrakheit doesn't give a reason for not shampooing his hair— just says he doesn't like to. What's a hipster without intentionality? Old-fashioned and proud and poor.
Giller Prize jury citation: "A work of startling emotional depth and intellectual rigor, Noor Naga's If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English probes the ethics of identity, desire, privilege and storytelling. Set in Cairo in the wake of the Arab Spring, the novel tracks the relationship between a troubled Egyptian photographer, and an Egyptian American woman recently arrived in the city. It is at once a love story, a disquisition on politics, an exploration of trauma and a deft work of meta fiction — a slim novel that at times seems almost infinitely capacious. Naga is a bold writer, unafraid of complexity and complication. She is also a magician with language. Every sentence in this exhilarating novel astonishes and provokes; in the end, the relationship Naga probes most urgently is our relationship with language, its power to coerce and control, and its power to liberate."
Naga is a bold writer, unafraid of complexity and complication. She is also a magician with language.- Giller Prize jury
LISTEN | Noor Naga talks about how Cairo influences her fiction with Shelagh Rogers:
We Measure the Earth With Our Bodies by Tsering Yangzom Lama
We Measure the Earth With Our Bodies recounts a Tibetan family's struggle to create new lives of dignity, love and hope after China's invasion of Tibet in the 1950s. Readers follow sisters Lhamo and Tenkyi on a multi-decade journey through exile, from a harrowing trek across the Himalayas to a refugee camp on the border of Nepal. Decades later, the sisters are separated. Tenyki lives in Toronto with Lhamo's daughter Dolma, who has to decide if it's worth risking her dreams to help her community.
"Within the last 50 years, Tibetans have lost their homelands and experienced profound upheaval — personal and societal. We have gone from being nomads or farmers living on our ancestral lands, to refugees begging on the streets for food, to immigrants living all over the world," Lama told CBC Books in an interview.
I wanted to understand what had happened to us, how we survived, and how colonization and exile have shaped us.- Tsering Yangzom Lama
"Tibetans in Tibet can no longer move freely throughout their country. They need Chinese permits to simply go from one region to another. The occupation of our homeland is also a form of spiritual violence, one that denies people freedom to worship in this ancient way. Meanwhile, those of us in exile cannot enter Tibet, except in rare circumstances. Instead, we travel across the face of the earth in search of safety and refuge. Whether inside or outside Tibet, we experience this colonization and displacement in our bodies. We carry it in our day-to-day existence."
"I wanted to understand what had happened to us, how we survived and how colonization and exile have shaped us."
Lama is a Tibetan Canadian author based in Vancouver. Born and raised in Nepal, she's also lived in Toronto and New York City. Lama holds a BA in creative writing and international relations from the University of British Columbia and a MFA from Columbia University. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including the Globe and Mail, The Malahat Review and Grain. We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies is her debut novel. Lama was named a writer to watch by CBC Books in 2022.
By sundown, they tell us, we will reach our sixth and final camp. Five rented buses have driven our group as far as the roads and riverbank would allow, and now we are on foot, walking in a deep river gorge, our steps and sightlines hemmed in by an endless procession of hills. The trail is narrow, so we walk in a long, slow line, all four hundred of us gathered from various border towns. Ahead, Ashang Migmar and Po Dhondup carry our possessions, their heavy sheepskin coats hanging from their waists, while I carry Tenkyi on my back. Like so many in our group, my little sister is unwell and too weak to walk. At least she's still with us. In Baglung, we heard that our aunt, Shumo Yangsel, and her husband had been there for several weeks before our arrival. They had begged for food on the side of the main road, telling anyone who passed by that their children were waiting in the mountains for help. Ashang thinks Shumo's sons must not have survived the journey out. He wants to find her, his little sister, and keeps asking the two foreign aid workers who rented the buses about her. But they don't know anything about Shumo's whereabouts. All they can tell us is that we're heading to the camp, our new home, they call it. A message passing slowly, in pieces, from their tongues to ours.
Giller Prize jury citation: "Through a stirring intergenerational saga that spans decades and continents, Tsering Yangzom Lama deftly unearths how exiles create home when their homeland has been stolen. With tender authenticity, We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies delicately and vigorously illustrates the ongoing human cost of Tibetan displacement, and the resolve of refugees to uphold a strong diaspora despite the violence of colonialism. The Tibetan women at the centre of Lama's story are bound by an unflinching love for each other, their people, and the country to which they can no longer return. Vast in time, space, and feeling, this determined novel builds a vibrant world that's both expansive and exact. Each line carefully bears the weight of longing for what once was, and the hope to sustain an uprooted culture still coming to be. Regenerative in spirit, the pages of this story are both an homage to survival and a home for the exiled."
LISTEN | Tsering Yangzom Lama on reflecting the Tibetan diaspora through fiction:
