Canada’s biggest prize for fiction, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, just got bigger. As the 2014 longlist of nominated books was revealed yesterday, the prize’s founder, Jack Rabinovitch, announced that the prize purse will double, to C$140,000. The winner will now receive C$100,000 and each finalist will receive C$10,000.

"When we started this prize 21 years ago with the assistance of Mordecai Richler, David Staines and Alice Munro, the intent was to highlight and reward Canadian fiction authors," Rabinovitch said. "The award then was $25,000, and we had a great deal of help from Canadian booksellers.” He thanked Scotiabank, which has been a partner for the prize for the past nine years, for making it possible to “achieve this objective in a manner we never thought possible.” He added, “Canadian storytellers deserve this recognition. I can hardly imagine what Doris would say,” referring to his late wife, a literary journalist in whose honor he created the prize.

The 12 books on the longlist were selected from among 161 titles submitted by 63 publishers. They are:

• Arjun Basu’s novel Waiting for the Man (ECW Press)
• David Bezmogis’s novel The Betrayers (HarperCollins Canada)
• Rivka Galchen’s short story collection American Innovations (HarperCollins Canada)
• Frances Itani’s novel Tell (HarperCollins Canada)
• Jennifer LoveGrove’s novel Watch How We Walk (ECW Press)
• Sean Michaels’ novel, Us Conductors (Random House Canada)
• Shani Mootoo’s novel Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab (Doubleday Canada)
• Heather O’Neill’s novel The Girl Who Was Saturday Night (HarperCollins Canada)
• Kathy Page’s short story collection Paradise and Elsewhere (John Metcalf Books/Biblioasis)
• Claire Holden Rothman’s novel My October (Penguin Canada)
• Miriam Toews’ novel All My Puny Sorrows (Knopf Canada)
• Padma Viswanathan’s novel The Ever After of Ashwin Rao (Random House Canada)

This year’s jury panel consists of Canadian author Shauna Singh Baldwin, British novelist Justin Cartwright, and American writer Francine Prose.

The shortlist will be announced on Oct. 6, and the prize will be awarded on Nov. 10 at a gala awards ceremony, which will be broadcast live nationally on CBC television.

Aside from the prize that goes to the authors, publishers in Canada covet the prize for its famed ability to cause sales spikes of more than 500%.