Indie publishers are dominating the 2022 Giller Prize long list.
The 14 books now in competition for the $100,000 award were announced Tuesday by 2021 prize winner Omar El Akkad in St. John’s, N.L., as the rest of the country watched on the prize’s Facebook channel, with the harbour and a foggy day providing a scenic background.
Indie press Coach House has two titles on the long list. “It’s not just the usual suspects, it’s a reminder that interesting literature is produced all across our country,” said editor-in-chief Alana Wilcox in an interview, commenting on the many independent publishers on the list. “We’re gobsmacked and utterly thrilled.”
In announcing the long list, El Akkad, who won for his book “What Strange Paradise,” talked about how winning is life-changing for a writer and “afforded me so many opportunities.” He also joked that “if you are nominated for this award it can quite often be an overwhelming experience,” not least because it will include battles on TikTok and Twitter in which authors will be copied for “no discernable reason. Enjoy it.”
The long list, in this 29th year of the Giller Prize, was whittled down from 138 submissions from publishers. It includes:
- Billy-Ray Belcourt for his first novel, “A Minor Chorus” (Hamish Hamilton); he won the 2018 Griffin Prize for his first poetry collection “This Wound Is a World”; his first memoir, “A History of My Brief Body,” was also acclaimed.
- Kim Fu for her short-story collection “Lesser-Known Monsters of the 21st Century” (Coach House Books), which the Star’s reviewer called “thoughtful, inventive and clever … a balm for anxious pandemic states of mind.”
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- Rawi Hage for his short-story collection “Stray Dogs” (Knopf Canada): No stranger to the list for his novels, this is Montreal writer Hage’s first short-story collection, which our reviewer said “reaffirms his devotion to acting as a witness for the fractious lives upended by history and the tides.”
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- Sheila Heti for her novel “Pure Colour” (Knopf Canada), in which God considers the first draft of his creation. She has written 10 acclaimed books, including “Motherhood” and “How Should A Person Be?”
- André Forget for his novel “In the City of Pigs” (Dundurn Press), which takes protagonist Alexander Otkazov from Montreal to Toronto to Halifax in search of an easy life. Toronto-born editor and writer Forget was out with two books this year, including the anthology “After Realism.”
- Brian Thomas Isaac for his debut novel “All The Quiet Places” (TouchWood Editions): Published almost a year ago, this coming-of-age story has already won an Indigenous Voices Award, been longlisted for Canada Reads and shortlisted for the Amazon First Novel prize.
- Conor Kerr for his debut novel “Avenue of Champions” (Nightwood Editions): The Métis-Ukrainian writer has already won a ReLit Award for this book, historically informed by the dissolution of the Papaschase First Nation by the government in the 19th century.
- Suzette Mayr for her novel “The Sleeping Car Porter” (Coach House Books): Mayr was longlisted for the Giller Prize in 2011 for “Monoceros.” Her new book is set in 1929: we’re on a trans-Canada train with Baxter, a queer Black train porter, who is saving money to attend dentistry school.
- Noor Naga for her debut novel “If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English” (Graywolf Press): Naga was born in Philadelphia, grew up in Dubai, studied in Toronto and now lives in Cairo; she’s won or been nominated for multiple Canadian prizes, including for her 2019 verse-novel “Washes, Prays.” This one, an experimental love story that takes place in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, won the Graywolf Press African prize and was subsequently published in Canada.
- André Narbonne for his novel “Lucien & Olivia” (Black Moss Press): Set in the 1980s — before cellphones, Facebook, etc. — Narbonne, now a professor at the University of Windsor, mines his early life as a marine engineer working on a tanker in this story of human relationships. He has also written poetry and prizewinning short fiction.
- Dimitri Nasrallah for his novel “Hotline” (Véhicule Press): This is Montreal-based Nasrallah’s fourth novel and features a recent immigrant, Muna Heddad, who gets a job as a hotline-operator at a weight-loss centre. Nasrallah, who has won and been nominated for numerous writing prizes, is the fiction editor at Véhicule Press.
- Fawn Parker for her book “What We Both Know” (McClelland & Stewart), which the Star’s reviewer called an “engrossing gut-punch of a novel” that features a woman caring for her abusive father and tasked with writing his memoir. It’s the award-winning writer’s third; she’s also written a volume of poetry.
- Tsering Yangzom Lama for her novel “We Measure the Earth With Our Bodies” (McClelland & Stewart) about which our reviewer said, “We’ll remember her primary focus: the tenacious identity of a people forever cast out from home.”
- Antoine Wilson for his novel “Mouth to Mouth” (Simon & Schuster Canada): This is Wilson’s third novel, weighing in at just 179 pages; about a Jeff, who saves another man’s life, and an examination of fate and serendipity.
The five-person jury was composed of Canadian authors Casey Plett (jury chair), Kaie Kellough, Waubgeshig Rice, and American authors Katie Kitamura and Scott Spencer.
The short list will be announced on Sept. 27; the Giller Prize will be awarded at a gala ceremony on Nov. 7.
The Giller Prize was founded by businessman and philanthropist Jack Rabinovitch in 1994 to honour his wife, Doris Giller, a former books editor at the Toronto Star who died of cancer in 1993. The prize then was $25,000. This year, the winner receives $100,000 with each of the shortlisted finalists receiving $10,000.
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