Island-raised DeWitt on Giller long list
MONTREAL — Marina Endicott, Patrick deWitt and Heather O’Neill are among 12 authors vying for the prestigious Scotiabank Giller Prize.
Last year’s winner, Us Conductors author Sean Michaels, announced the picks Wednesday in Montreal, where he outlined a long list stacked with established writers.
The Edmonton-based Endicott makes the cut with Close to Hugh (Doubleday Canada), a look at one week in the world of gallery-owner Hugh Argylle. He falls off a ladder early in the novel and in the ensuing days wrestles with his relationship to his ailing mother and the prospect of newfound love.
Endicott finds herself again chasing the $100,000 prize after her novel Good to a Fault was a finalist in 2008 and The Little Shadows was longlisted in 2011.
Vancouver Island-raised deWitt is in the running for his novel Undermajordomo Minor (House of Anansi Press). The gothic fairy tale follows Lucien (Lucy) Minor, a 17-year-old with a penchant for lying, as he leaves his village to work for a baron at the Castle Von Aux.
His comic western The Sisters Brothers was a literary sensation in 2011, winning the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and a Governor General’s Literary Award. It was also a finalist for the Man Booker and Scotiabank Giller prizes.
Montreal’s O’Neill is a contender for her story collection Daydreams of Angels (HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.), which includes tales about a naive cult follower, the struggle of two young women in occupied Paris, and generations of failed Nureyev clones in postSoviet Russia.
Her first novel, Lullabies for Little Criminals, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award, while her follow-up, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, was a 2014 Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist.
The titles were chosen from a field of 168 books submitted by 63 publishers, which organizers say is a record number in the prize’s 22-year history. A short list will be announced in Toronto on Oct. 5.
The annual prize awards $100,000 to the author of the best Canadian novel or short story collection published in English. Each finalist gets $10,000. The books were chosen by a five-member jury that included Irish author John Boyne, Canadian writers Cecil Foster, Alexander MacLeod and Alison Pick, and British author Helen Oyeyemi.
The gala hosted by Rick Mercer is set to air Nov. 10 on CBC-TV.