TORONTO, Jan. 19, 2021 /CNW/ - Elana Rabinovitch,
Executive Director of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, today announced
the five-member jury panel for the 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize.
This year marks the 28th anniversary of the
Prize.
The 2021 jury members are:
Award winning Canadian authors Megan
Gail Coles, Zalika Reid-Benta
(jury chair) and Joshua
Whitehead, Malaysian writer and Whitbread and
Commonwealth award winner, Tash
Aw and American author and winner of the Dylan Thomas
Prize, Joshua Ferris.
Some background on the 2021 jury:
Tash Aw was born in
Taiwan to Malaysian parents and
grew up in Kuala Lumpur. He moved
to England in his teens and
studied Law at the University of
Cambridge and Warwick.
After working as a lawyer for four years, he studied Creative
Writing at the University of East
Anglia. His first novel, The Harmony Silk
Factory (2005), won the 2005 Whitbread First Novel Award,
and the Commonwealth Writers Prize (South
East Asia and South Pacific Region Best First Book). His
subsequent novels include Map of the Invisible
World (2009) and Five Star
Billionaire (2013). In 2019, Aw published We, the
Survivors, with Fourth Estate. His work of short
fiction Sail won the O. Henry Prize in 2013 and he
has been published in A Public Space and the
landmark Granta 100, amongst others.
Megan Gail
Coles is a graduate of Memorial
University of Newfoundland, National Theatre School of
Canada and University of British Columbia. She is the
Co-Founder and Artistic Director of Poverty Cove Theatre Company
for whom she has written numerous award-winning plays. Her debut
short fiction collection, Eating Habits of the Chronically
Lonesome, won the BMO Winterset Award, the ReLit Award, the
Margaret and John Savage First Book
Award and earned her the Writers' Trust of Canada 5×5 Prize. Her debut
novel, Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club,
was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, a contender for CBC
Canada Reads and recently won the BMO Winterset Award. Originally
from Savage Cove on the Great
Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland, Megan lives in St. John's where she is the Executive Director
of Riddle Fence and a PhD candidate at Concordia University. Megan's debut poetry
collection is forthcoming from House of Anansi this
fall.
Joshua Ferris is the author of three previous
novels, Then We Came to the End, The Unnamed and
To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, and a collection of stories,
The Dinner Party. He was a finalist for the National Book
Award, winner of the Barnes and Noble Discover Award and the
PEN/Hemingway Award, and was named one of The New Yorker's
"20 Under 40" writers in 2010. To Rise Again at a Decent
Hour won the Dylan Thomas Prize and was shortlisted for the
Booker Prize. His short stories have appeared in The New
Yorker, Granta, and Best American Short Stories.
Ferris lives in New York.
Zalika Reid Benta is
a Toronto-based writer. Her debut
short story collection Frying Plantain won the
23rd annual Danuta Gleed Literary Award and the 2020
Kobo Emerging Writer Prize in literary fiction. Frying
Plantain was shortlisted for the 2020 Toronto Book Awards, the
2020 Trillium Book Award and longlisted for the 2019
Scotiabank Giller Prize. The collection is currently nominated for
the 2021 White Pine Award and was shortlisted for the Forest of
Reading Evergreen Award presented by the Ontario Library
Association. Reid Benta is also the
winner of the 2019 Byblacks People's Choice Awards for Best
Author. Frying Plantain has been on numerous
"must read" lists from Buzzfeed, Bustle, Refinery29, Chatelaine
Magazine, Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail, and was also listed
as one of Indigo's 50 "Best Books of 2019". Reid Benta was the June
2019 Writer in Residence for Open Book and she was listed in
CBC's "6 Canadian Writers to Watch in 2019". She received an MFA in
fiction from Columbia University, was
the 2019 John Gardner Fiction Fellow at the Breadloaf Writers'
Conference and is an alumnus of the 2017 Banff Writers' Studio. She
is currently working on a young-adult fantasy novel drawing
inspiration from Jamaican folklore.
Joshua Whitehead is a
Two-Spirit, Oji-nêhiyaw member of Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1).
He is the author of full-metal indigiqueer (Talonbooks 2017)
which was shortlisted for the inaugural Indigenous Voices Award and
the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for
Poetry. He is also the author of Jonny
Appleseed (Arsenal Pulp Press 2018) which was longlisted
for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, shortlisted for the Indigenous
Voices Award, the Governor General's Literary Award, the Amazon
Canada First Novel Award and the Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award.
It won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction and the
Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction.
Whitehead is currently working on a third manuscript titled,
Making Love with the Land to be published with Knopf Canada,
which explores the intersections of Indigeneity, queerness, and,
most prominently, mental health through a nêhiyaw lens. His work
has been published in such venues as Prairie Fire,
CV2, EVENT, Arc Poetry Magazine, The
Fiddlehead, Grain, CNQ, Write, and Red
Rising Magazine.
Images of the 2021 jurors are available at
www.scotiabankgillerprize.ca/media-resources.
Audible.ca will provide each jury member with a
complimentary one-year membership to listen to available
submissions, as well as titles by other Canadian writers. For all
listeners, Audible.ca has a dedicated Scotiabank Giller Prize
page for easy discovery of some of Canada's most exciting literary voices.
We hope to present the longlist in St.
John's, Newfoundland in early September, with the shortlist
announced later in the month in Toronto. If COVID-19 restrictions still apply
in 2021, the announcements will be made virtually. The winner will
be named at a nationally televised black-tie dinner and awards
ceremony in Toronto in November,
COVID-19 permitting.
Submissions are now being accepted. The 2021 submission
package including updated details can be found at
www.scotiabankgillerprize.ca/about/submissions. The first
submission deadline for books published between October 1, 2020 and February 28, 2021 are to be received by
February 12, 2021.
About the Prize
The Giller Prize, founded by
Jack Rabinovitch in 1994, highlights
the very best in Canadian fiction year after year. In 2005, the
prize teamed up with Scotiabank who increased the winnings
four-fold. The Scotiabank Giller Prize now awards $100,000 annually to the author of the best
Canadian novel or short story collection published in English, and
$10,000 to each of the finalists. The
award is named in honour of the late literary journalist
Doris Giller by her husband
Toronto businessman Jack Rabinovitch, who passed away in
August 2017.
About Scotiabank
Scotiabank is a leading bank in the
Americas. Guided by our purpose: "for every future", we help our
customers, their families and their communities achieve success
through a broad range of advice, products and services, including
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With a team of over 90,000 employees and assets of
approximately $1.1 trillion (as at October 31,
2020), Scotiabank trades on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: BNS)
and New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: BNS). For more information,
please visit http://www.scotiabank.com and follow us on
Twitter @ScotiabankViews.
About Audible, Inc.
Audible, a leading producer and
provider of original spoken-word entertainment and audiobooks, is
committed to supporting talented Canadian authors and creators and
is proud to be the exclusive audiobook sponsor of the Scotiabank
Giller Prize. At Audible.ca, an Amazon.com, Inc.
subsidiary (NASDAQ: AMZN), we believe storytelling and the spoken
word have the power to help people rediscover the joy in listening,
making us more informed, more connected, and more human. Audible
content includes hundreds of thousands of audiobooks, podcasts,
guided wellness programs, theatrical performances, A-list comedy,
and exclusive Audible Originals you won't find anywhere else.
SOURCE The Bank of Nova
Scotia