Ian Williams to chair 2023 Scotiabank Giller Prize jury
Canadians Sharon Bala and Brian Thomas Isaac are also on the 5-person jury panel
Ian Williams will chair the 2023 Scotiabank Giller Prize jury.
The $100,000 prize is the biggest in Canadian literature.
Williams is a writer and teacher from Brampton, Ont. He won the Giller Prize in 2019 for his novel Reproduction. His other books include the poetry collection Personals, the short fiction collection Not Anyone's Anything and the essay collection Disorientation. He is currently a professor at the University of Toronto.
Joining Williams on the jury are Canadian writers Sharon Bala and Brian Thomas Isaac and American author Rebecca Makkai and Indian writer Neel Mukherjee.
Bala is a writer from Newfoundland. She is the author of the novel The Boat People, which won the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction and the Newfoundland & Labrador Book Award. The Boat People was also championed by singer and TV host Mozhdah Jamalzadah on Canada Reads 2018.
Isaac was born on the Okanagan Indian Reserve, in south central B.C. He's worked in oil fields, as a bricklayer, and he had a short career riding bulls in local rodeos. As a lover of sports, he has coached minor hockey. All the Quiet Places is his first book.
All the Quiet Places was on the Canada Reads 2022 longlist and the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist and was a finalist for the 2022 Governor General's Literary Award for fiction.
Makkai is the author of the novels The Great Believers, The Hundred-Year House and The Borrower. The Great Believers was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the U.S. National Book Award. Makkai lives in Chicago, where she teaches at Northwestern University and is the artistic director of the nonprofit writing organization StoryStudio Chicago.
Mukherjee is the author of the novels A Life Apart, The Lives of Others and Past Continuous. The Lives of Others was a finalist for the Booker Prize and the Costa Best Novel Award.
2023 will mark the 30th anniversary of the Giller Prize.
Books published between Oct. 1, 2022 and Sept. 30, 2023 will be eligible for the 2023 prize. The longlist, shortlist and winner will be announced in the fall.
Jack Rabinovitch founded the prize in honour of his late wife Doris Giller in 1994. Rabinovitch died in 2017 at the age of 87.
The 2022 winner was Calgary writer Suzette Mayr for her novel The Sleeping Car Porter.
Other past Giller Prize winners include Omar El Akkad for What Strange Paradise, Souvankham Thammavongsa for How to Pronounce Knife, Esi Edugyan for Washington Black and Half-Blood Blues, Margaret Atwood for Alias Grace, Ian Williams for Reproduction and Alice Munro for Runaway.
The Giller Prize is currently hosting a monthly virtual book club featuring the 2022 longlisted writers.
