TORONTO, Feb. 12, 2018 /CNW/ - Elana Rabinovitch, Executive Director of the
Scotiabank Giller Prize, today announced the five member jury panel
for the 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize. This year marks the 25th
anniversary of the Prize.
The 2018 jury members are:
Canadian writer and journalist Kamal
Al-Solaylee, playwright and VP of advancement for the
Toronto International Film
Festival (TIFF) Maxine
Bailey, American writer John
Freeman, English novelist Philip Hensher, and Canadian author
Heather O'Neill.
Some background on the 2018 jury:
Kamal Al-Solaylee is the
author of Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes, shortlisted for
the Writers' Trust Hilary Weston Prize for Nonfiction and winner of
the Toronto Book Award, and Brown: What Being Brown in the World
Today Means (to Everyone), a Governor General Literary Awards
finalist and winner of the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political
Writing. He was previously a theatre critic at the Globe and
Mail and over the past two decades has written on books, the
performing arts, and politics for The Walrus, Toronto
Star, Literary Review of Canada, Quill & Quire,
Elle Canada, Canadian Notes &
Queries and Maclean's. Al-Solaylee is an associate
professor of Journalism at Ryerson University.
Maxine Bailey is the
Vice-President of Advancement for the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF).
Prior to TIFF she was in theatre and co-wrote the award-winning
play Sistahs. An active member in arts and community-based
projects, she co-founded the Black Artists Network in Dialogue
(BAND) which showcases black cultural contributions nationally and
internationally. She participates in the advisory boards and
steering committees for the Toronto Arts Council, the City of Toronto's Film, Television and Digital
Media Board, The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery Board and the
Ontario Cultural Attractions Fund.
John Freeman is the
founder of the literary biannual Freeman's and author
of several books including Maps, a collection of poems;
How to Read a Novelist, profiles of leading writers; and
The Tyranny of Email, a study of electronic communication
and its effect on us. He has assembled two anthologies about
inequality in the United States:
Tales of Two Cities, which focused on New York City and Tales of Two
Americas. His work has appeared in The New Yorker,
The New York Times, The Paris
Review and been translated into more than 20 languages. The
former editor of Granta, Freeman lives in New York City where he teaches at The New School and is Writer in Residence at
NYU.
Philip Hensher was born in
London. His novels include
Kitchen Venom, which won the Somerset Maugham Award, The
Northern Clemency, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker
Prize, King of the Badgers, and Scenes from Early
Life, which won the Ondaatje Prize. His most recent novel is
The Friendly Ones. He also wrote the libretto for
Thomas Ades's opera Powder Her
Face and edited The Penguin Book of the British Short
Story. He was a Granta Best of Young British Novelist in 2002
and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature from 1999. Among
his distinctions is an honorary doctorate from Sheffield University. Hensher is Professor of
Creative Writing at the University of Bath Spa and lives in
London and Geneva.
Heather O'Neill is a
novelist, short story writer, poet and essayist. Her work, which
includes Lullabies for Little Criminals, The Girl Who Was
Saturday Night, Daydreams of Angels and The Lonely Hearts
Hotel, has been shortlisted for the Governor General's Award
for Fiction, The Orange Prize for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller
Prize in two consecutive years, and has won CBC Canada Reads, The
Paragraphe MacLennan Prize for Fiction and the Danuta Gleed Award. Born and raised in
Montreal, O'Neill lives there
today.
Images of the 2018 jurors are available on the Media Resource
page at www.scotiabankgillerprize.ca
Rakuten Kobo has generously donated a Kobo Aura eReader
to each member of the 2018 jury panel. The Scotiabank Giller Prize
requires publishers to provide digital copies of its submitted
titles in addition to print books.
This year's longlist will be announced at a press event in
St. John's, Newfoundland on
September 17 and the shortlist will
be announced at a press event in Toronto on October
1. The finalists will be honoured and a winner named at a
nationally televised black-tie dinner and awards ceremony in
Toronto in November.
Submissions are now being accepted. The 2018 submission
package including new and updated rules and details can be
found at Scotiabankgillerprize.ca/submissions. The first submission
deadline for books published between October 1, 2017 and
February 28, 2018 are to be received
by February 15, 2018.
About the Prize
The Scotiabank Giller Prize, founded
in 1994, highlights the very best in Canadian fiction year after
year. The Prize 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 Canada's international
bank and a leading financial services provider in North America, Latin
America, the Caribbean and
Central America, and Asia-Pacific. We are dedicated to helping our
24 million customers become better off through a broad range of
advice, products and services, including personal and commercial
banking, wealth management and private banking, corporate and
investment banking, and capital markets. With a team of more than
88,000 employees and assets of over $915
billion (as at October 31,
2017), Scotiabank trades on the Toronto (TSX: BNS) and New York Exchanges
(NYSE: BNS). For more information, please
visit www.scotiabank.com and follow us on Twitter
@Scotiabank.
SOURCE Scotiabank