3 of 5 Titles Shortlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize Are Penguin Random House Canada
Penguin Random House Canada is pleased to announce that we have three incredible titles on this year’s Giller Prize shortlist! The $100,000 award annually recognizes the best in Canadian fiction.
This year’s shortlist includes the “intellectually stimulating” and “imaginatively rendered” CURIOSITIES by Anne Fleming, edited by Lynn Henry for Knopf Canada; the “breathtaking and mysterious” novel HELD by Anne Michaels, edited by Jared Bland for McClelland & Stewart; and the “searing yet compassionate, sharp yet tender” PRAIRIE EDGE by Conor Kerr, edited by Jordan Ginsberg for Strange Light. Please join me today in offering a heartfelt congratulations to our authors Anne, Anne, and Conor, to our colleagues Lynn, Jared, and Jordan, and to the entire Knopf Canada and McClelland & Stewart teams, as well as our audiobook team who produced audiobooks for all three of our shortlisted titles.
Of Anne Fleming’s CURIOSITIES, the jury said: “Curiosities begins in 17th century England beset by the plague and rife with superstition and fear. A series of archived memoirs that the amateur historian Anne is researching provide a puzzle and the means by which this thrillingly inventive novel immerses us in the historic and illuminates the contemporary…. Singular and surprising, Curiosities is a captivating story of hope, change, and belonging, and first and foremost a testament to varieties of love that endure beyond any one history or era.”
Of Anne Michaels’ HELD they wrote: “Held is a novel that floats, a beguiling association of memories, projections, and haunted instances through which the very notion of our mortality, of our resilience and desires, is interrogated in passages as impactful as they can be hypnotic…. Michaels’ mastery of word and situations is understated but insistent, an altogether successful reliance that deflects attention from its author and embeds the reader in the resoundingly mysterious and ephemeral. Here is a novel in which we are willingly held.”
And of Conor Kerr’s PRAIRIE EDGE, they said: “Prairie Edge is both a propulsive crime narrative built around successive, compounding blunders and a work of literary art that tells us about what it means to live in a world where action and rhetoric around decolonization fail to align….Kerr extracts maximum amounts of comedy and pathos from the novel’s premise while populating this fictional world with resonant characters whose difficult experiences with group homes, social services, and activist circles are softened by enduring family bonds and friendships. Kerr entertains us with a contemporary caper while inviting readers to consider a future that has reckoned with the past.”
The Winner of the 2024 Giller Prize will be broadcast on CBC and CBC Gem on November 18, 2024 at 9 p.m. (as well as CBC Radio One and CBC Listen) where we’ll hope to crown our twenty-third Penguin Random House Giller Prize winner.
Congratulations again to everyone involved in these exciting titles.