Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist includes Globe journalist Menaka Raman-Wilms, previous nominees

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The Scotiabank Giller Prize has released its long list of titles that will compete for Canada’s most prestigious award for fiction. Among the dozen nominated authors is journalist Menaka Raman-Wilms, the host of The Globe and Mail’s daily news podcast, The Decibel. Her first novel, The Rooftop Garden, is a story about a lost childhood friend, rising oceans and a trip to Berlin.

Raman-Wilms’s book is not the only longlisted work that focuses on climate change. Kasia Van Schaik’s We Have Never Lived on Earth, the debut story collection from the Montreal-based South African poet, traverses the female experience in a world threatened by ecological crisis. And Deborah Willis’s debut novel Girlfriend on Mars satirically looks the twin crises of climate change and inequality.

Calgary’s Willis is among three authors whose work has been previously recognized by the Giller Prize, founded in 1994. Her The Dark and Other Love Stories was longlisted in 2017.

David Bergen, who won in 2005 for The Time in Between, looks to add a second statuette to his trophy case for this year’s Away from the Dead, a novel set in Ukraine amid the tumult of the Russian Revolution. Shortlisted on two other occasions, the Winnipeg author probably knows the Giller gala dinner menu by heart.

Toronto’s CS Richardson, longlisted for 2012′s The Emperor of Paris, is back again with All the Colour In the World, a drama set against the sweep of the 20th century – from Canada in the twenties and thirties, through the battle fields of the Second World War, to 1960s Sicily.

This year’s contenders for the $100,000 prize were chosen from 145 books written in English submitted by publishers across Canada, an all-time record number of submissions. The 10 novels and two short-story collections were selected by a panel of five judges: Canadian authors Ian Williams, Sharon Bala and Brian Thomas Isaac, U.S. author Rebecca Makkai and London-based writer Neel Mukherjee.

The seven other nominated books are as follows:

• Study For Obedience, by the Scotland-based Montreal native Sarah Bernstein, is also in contention for this year’s Booker Prize.
• Birnam Wood, by Canadian-born New Zealand writer Eleanor Catton. Her second novel, The Luminaries, won the 2013 Booker Prize.
• The Double Life of Benson Yu, by Vancouver’s Kevin Chong, is a work of metafiction about a graphic novelist and his fraught upbringing in the city’s Chinatown.
• The Clarion, by Toronto’s Nina Dunic, is a debut novel about a brother and sister struggling to find a place in the world while establishing a sense of self.
• We Meant Well, by Toronto’s Erum Shazia Hasan, who is a sustainable development consultant for various UN agencies. Her debut novel is set in a fictional village in an unnamed former French colony and centres on a humanitarian aid worker accused of rape.
• The Islands: Stories, by Toronto native Dionne Irving, a professor at the University of Notre Dame. Her short-story collection, on the lives of Jamaican women who have relocated all over the world to escape the ghosts of colonialism, was shortlisted for the 2023 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
• Wait Softly Brother, by Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, a veteran writer and professor at the University of Toronto. Her fourth novel covers lost siblings, Scottish folk tales and the horrors of war, while questioning the truths hidden in family lore.

Sixty-two books to read this fall

The long list will be narrowed down to a five-title short list, to be announced Oct. 11. The winner will be announced at a gala dinner in Toronto on Nov. 13.

Recent Giller Prize takers include Souvankham Thammavongsa, for How to Pronounce Knife; Omar El Akkad, for What Strange Paradise; and last year’s winner Suzette Mayr, for The Sleeping Car Porter.