The jury will chop down the longlist to a five-book shortlist on Oct. 6, with the winning title to be named on Nov. 17.Supplied
Three former winners have landed on the longlist for the 2025 Giller Prize, Canada’s richest prize for fiction. Ian Williams (for his novel You’ve Changed), André Alexis (for his short story collection Other Worlds) and Souvankham Thammavongsa (for her novel Pick a Colour) are among the 14 authors in contention for the $100,000 award.
In July, the Giller Foundation announced that the prize would be forced to cease operations at the end of this year without federal funding. The Giller Prize was known as the Scotiabank Giller Prize from 2005 to 2023. Its sponsorship relationship with the bank does not extend beyond 2025.
The foundation faced criticism and protests for its association with the bank, whose subsidiary 1832 Asset Management at one point was the biggest international investor in Elbit Systems Ltd., Israel’s most prominent publicly traded arms company.
The 14 titles were chosen from a field of more than 100 books submitted by publishers across Canada. One of this year’s nominees, Emma Donoghue (for her novel The Paris Express) hopes four times is the charm. The playwright and novelist was previously longlisted for The Sealed Letter, The Wonder (which advanced to the shortlist) and The Pull of the Stars.
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Mona Awad, longlisted for her novel We Love You, Bunny, was previously shortlisted for 2016’s 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl.
The nine newbie nominees are Kirti Bhadresa, Otoniya J. Okot Bitek, Fanny Britt, Joanna Cockerline, Holly Kennedy, Emma Knight, Amanda Leduc, Bindu Suresh and Eddy Boudel Tan.
In a statement, the Giller jury said the longlisted books “represent a range of Canadian identities and experiences: characters on the open prairies, claustrophobic communities in our urban centers, and boundless representations of the imagined worlds in which Canadians find themselves.”
The three-member Canadian jury for 2025 is chaired by fiction author and University of Notre Dame creative writing professor, Dionne Irving Bremyer. Jury member Loghan Paylor’s first novel, The Cure for Drowning, was longlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize and named one of The Globe and Mail’s best 100 books of 2024.
Completing the jury is Deepa Rajagopalan, author of the short story collection Peacocks of Instagram, which was shortlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize.
The jury will chop down the longlist to a five-book shortlist on Oct. 6, with the winning title to be named on Nov. 17.
