MICHAEL REDHILL WINS GILLER PRIZE FOR BELLEVUE SQUARE.
Michael Redhill has won the 24th annual Scotiabank Giller Prize for his novel Bellevue Square, beating out Rachel Cusk’s Transit, Ed O’Loughlin’s Minds of Winter, Eden Robinson’s Son of a Trickster and Michelle Winters’s I Am a Truck. Redhill was previously a finalist in 2001 for his novel Martin Sloane.
The ceremony, hosted by entertainer Mary Walsh at the Ritz- Carlton in Toronto, was bittersweet due to the passing of prize founder Jack Rabinovitch this past August. His signature closing line, “For the price of a dinner in this town you can buy all the nominated books. So, eat at home and buy the books,” was proclaimed this year by his daughter, Elana Rabinovitch, Executive Director of the Scotiabank Giller Prize. The award was established in 1994 by Rabinovitch in honour of his late wife, journalist Doris Giller.
Bellevue Square, published by Doubleday Canada, is Redhill’s fourth novel under his own name; he has written four more under the pseudonym Inger Ash Wolfe.
The novel is a literary thriller — about a Toronto bookstore owner who becomes obsessed with her apparent doppelgänger roaming Kensington Market — but is not without a sense of humour, something also on display in Redhill’s acceptance speech.
Describing the experience of being longlisted, then shortlisted, for the prize, Redhill said, “Judging by all the things that have been happening to me, I must be in a coma. But if I am, you guys are too, so let’s not all wake up from it.”
He later singled our his mother, thanking her for filling his childhood home with books. “Because of her love of reading I wanted to make her books.” Then, to her: “I think some of them have really freaked you out.”
The prize jury, chaired by Anita Rau Badami, also included previous Scotiabank Giller Prize winners André Alexis (2015) and Lynn Coady (2013), as well as British author Richard Beard and American writer Nathan Englander.
They read 112 books to reach a longlist of 12, before announcing the five finalists at the beginning of October.
During t he presentation of the finalists, Redhill called daydreaming “part of the job description,” of being a writer, and that writing was “monetizing your daydreams.”
It was a memorable turn of phrase for an author about to receive the $100,000 purse.