The shortlist for Canada’s most prestigious fiction prize the Scotiabank Giller Prize was announced yesterday in Toronto. This year’s list stood out from past years’ due to a predominance of books from small to medium-sized publishers.
Selected from submissions of 98 books from 38 publishers across the country by a three-member jury, the five books in the running for the C$50,000 prize are:
The Matter with Morris by David Bergen (Phyllis Bruce Books/HarperCollins Canada)
Light Lifting by Alexander MacLeod (Biblioasis)
This Cake is for the Party by Sarah Selecky (Thomas Allen Publishers)
The Sentimentalists by Johanna Skibsrud (Gaspereau Press)
Annabel by Kathleen Winter (House of Anansi Press)
The 2010 jurists now busy narrowing the list down to the winner are CBC journalist and broadcaster Michael Enright, American author Claire Messud and UK author Ali Smith. “I think Claire said this is where there will be blood on the floor or something like that,” Enright said, chuckling.
Asked about the unusual number of title from smaller presses, Enright noted that the heavyweight names in Canadian literature were not among the submissions this year, “no Alice Munro or Margaret Atwood or Alistair MacLeod from the major houses.” The biggest name on this year’s shortlist is David Bergen who won the Giller Prize in 2005 for his novel The Time In Between, and his is the only book published by one of the big multinational publishers, HarperCollins Canada. In fact, the other books on the shortlist are debuts. MacLeod and Selecky’s books are debut short story collections, and Skibsrud and Winter have debut novels.
But Enright said the jury paid no attention to which book was published by which house as they were reading and debating. “I don’t think we even looked at the spine to see who the publisher was, we just read the books as books,” he said.
Still as the longlist and shortlists came together, he said he was surprised to discover “this wonderful vein of smaller presses…., I read a lot of books in the course of a broadcast season, but to find this kind of quality in these smaller presses was just extraordinary.”
Although reading 98 books in six months is not an experience he wants to repeat, Enright says it was rewarding. “I found that in the longlist as well, but certainly in the shortlist, you pick the book up and 150 pages in I said to myself ‘Holy God, where have you been all my life?’ It was the shock of the new and the recognition of it that I found startling actually.”
The winner will be announced at a gala in Toronto on Nov. 9. Finalists are awarded C$5,000 each.
