TORONTO, Jan. 28, 2019 /CNW/ - Elana Rabinovitch, Executive Director of the
Scotiabank Giller Prize, today announced the five member jury panel
for the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize. This year marks the 26th
anniversary of the Prize.
The 2019 jury members are:
Canadian authors Donna Bailey
Nurse and Randy
Boyagoda (jury chair), Canadian playwright José
Teodoro, Scottish-Sierra Leonean author Aminatta Forna
and Bosnian-American author Aleksandar (Sasha) Hemon.
Some background on the 2019 jury:
Randy Boyagoda is the
author of five books, including three works of fiction. His debut
novel, Governor of the Northern Province, was nominated
for the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2006. His second
novel, Beggar's Feast, was nominated for the IMPAC
Dublin Literary Prize and selected as a New York Times Book
Review Editor's Choice. His most recent
novel, Original Prin, was published in 2018 and was
named a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year. He is the
Principal and Vice-President of St. Michael's
College at the University of
Toronto, a Professor of English, and holds the Basilian
Chair in Christianity, Arts, and Letters. Boyagoda served as
President of PEN Canada from 2015-2017 and lives in Toronto.
Aminatta Forna is an award-winning novelist, essayist and
memoirist. Her novels include Happiness, The Hired
Man and The Memory of Love, which won the Commonwealth
Writers Prize, the Aidoo Snyder Prize and Germany's Literaturpreis. Her work has been
translated into more than 20 languages and her essays on society,
politics and culture have appeared in Freeman's,
Granta, The Guardian, The Nation and The
New York Review of Books. Forna is a Fellow of the Royal
Society of Literature, a recipient of a Windham Campbell Award and was made OBE in the
Queen's New Year's Honours 2017. She currently lives in
Arlington, Virginia.
Aleksandar (Sasha) Hemon
is the author of The Lazarus Project, The Book of My Lives,
and The Making of Zombie Wars. He has been the recipient of
a Guggenheim Fellowship, a "genius grant" from the MacArthur
Foundation, the Jan Michalski Prize for Literature, the PEN/ W.G.
Sebald Award, 2012 USA Fellowship, and most recently 2017
PEN/Jean Stein Grant for Oral
History. He teaches at Princeton
University in New
Jersey.
Donna Bailey Nurse is a
leading literary critic, editor of the ground breaking Revival:
An Anthology of Black Canadian Writing and author of What's
A Black Critic to Do. A former member of the Toronto Arts
Council's Literary Arts Committee, Bailey
Nurse has curated reading series in conjunction with the
Toronto Public Library and the Art Gallery of Ontario. She is a contributor to Maclean's,
The Walrus and The Literary Review of Canada, and a columnist for The Next
Chapter on CBC Radio. Her work has appeared in The Boston Globe,
The Globe and Mail and The Toronto Star. She lives in
Pickering, Ontario.
José Teodoro is the author of several plays, including
Mote, Cloudless, The Tourist and Slowly, an
exchange is taking place. Teodoro's play Steps was
recently published in Playwrights Canada Press' anthology
Long Story Short. He has
worked as story editor on acclaimed films including Hugh Gibson's documentary feature The
Stairs, winner of the TFCA's 2016 Rogers Best Canadian Film
Award, and Lina Rodríguez's Señoritas and This Time
Tomorrow. Teodoro is currently developing a book of
conversations with Swiss-Canadian filmmaker Peter Mettler entitled Nothing But Time.
He lives in Toronto.
Images of the 2019 jurors are available on the media resources
page at scotiabankgillerprize.ca
Rakuten Kobo has generously donated a Kobo Aura
Edition 2 eReader to each member of the 2019 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 later in the same month 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. The 2019 submission
package including updated details can be found at
scotiabankgillerprize.ca/about/submissions. The first
submission deadline for books published between October
1, 2018 and February 28, 2019
are to be received by February 15,
2019.
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 4-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