TORONTO, Jan. 13, 2020 /CNW/ - Elana Rabinovitch, Executive Director of the
Scotiabank Giller Prize, today announced the five-member jury panel
for the 2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize. This year marks the
27th anniversary of the
Prize.
The 2020 jury members are:
Canadian authors David
Chariandy, Eden Robinson and
Mark Sakamoto (jury chair),
British critic and Editor of the Culture segment of the Guardian,
Claire Armitstead, and
Canadian/British author and journalist, Tom Rachman.
Some background on the 2020 jury:
Claire Armitstead is
Associate Editor, Culture, at the Guardian, where she has
previously acted as arts editor, literary editor and head of books.
She presents the weekly Guardian books podcast and is a regular
commentator on radio, and at live events across the UK and
internationally. She is a trustee of English PEN.
David Chariandy is a
writer and critic. His first novel, Soucouyant, was
nominated for 11 literary prizes, including the Governor General's
Award and the Scotiabank Giller Prize. His second novel,
Brother, was nominated for fourteen prizes, winning the
Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, the Ethel Wilson Fiction
Prize, and the Toronto Book Award. Brother was also
widely translated and named a book of the year by The Globe and
Mail, The National Post, The Toronto Star, The
Montreal Gazette, Quill and Quire, the CBC, the New York Public
Library, Kirkus Reviews, Esquire Magazine, and The
Guardian. David's most recent book is a memoir entitled
I've Been Meaning to Tell You: A Letter to My
Daughter. He lives in Vancouver and is an editor of Brick and
a Professor of English at Simon Fraser University. In 2019,
David was awarded Yale University's
Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction.
Tom Rachman is the
author of four works of fiction, including the international
bestseller The Imperfectionists (2010), which was longlisted
for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, won the Canadian Authors Award for
Fiction, and was named a New York
Times book of the year. His most recent novel, The
Italian Teacher (2018), was shortlisted for both the Costa
Award and the South Bank Sky Arts Award. Rachman has written for
The Globe & Mail, The New York
Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street
Journal, the Times Literary Supplement, and The New
Yorker and Atlantic online. Born in London, he was raised in Vancouver, attended the University of Toronto and Columbia University, and worked as a journalist for
the Associated Press in Rome and the International Herald
Tribune in Paris. He is based
in London.
Eden Robinson is a
Haisla/Heiltsuk author who grew up in Haisla, British
Columbia. Her first book, Traplines, a collection of
short stories, won the Winifred
Holtby Memorial Prize and was a New
York Times Notable Book of the Year in
1998. Monkey Beach, her first novel, was shortlisted
for both the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General's
Literary Award for fiction in 2000 and won the BC Book Prize's
Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Her novel Son of a
Trickster was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller
Prize. Her latest novel is its sequel, Trickster Drift,
which won the 2019 Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize.
Mark Sakamoto has enjoyed
a rich and varied career. He began his professional career in live
music, working with several international acts. He has worked at a
national law firm, a national broadcaster and has served as a
senior political advisor to a national party leader. He is an
entrepreneur and investor in digital health and digital media. Mark
is the Executive Vice-President for Think Research, an
international big data health firm in Toronto. In that capacity, he is responsible
for driving all aspects of business development. Sakamoto's
book, Forgiveness: A Gift from My Grandparents won CBC
Canada Reads and has been a number one national best seller in two
separate years. It is currently being developed for screen and
theatre. Mark is the host and executive producer of Good
People, a CBC television series which explores societal
problems and scours the planet for hopeful places and
solutions. He lives in Toronto with his wife and their two
daughters.
Images of the 2020 jurors are available on the Media Resource
page at www.scotiabankgillerprize.ca.
Rakuten Kobo has generously donated a Kobo Aura
Edition 2 eReader to each member of the 2020 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 presented in St. John's, Newfoundland in early September
and the shortlist announced in early October at an event in
Toronto. The winner is named at a
nationally televised black-tie dinner and awards ceremony in
Toronto in November.
Submissions are now being accepted. For the first time in its
history, the Scotiabank Giller Prize is accepting graphic novels
from Canadian publishers. The 2020 submission package
including updated details can be found at
Scotiabankgillerprize.ca/about/submissions. The first
submission deadline for books published between October
1, 2019 and February 28, 2020
are to be received by February 14,
2020.
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.
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SOURCE Scotiabank