Giller Prize 2015: And the Winner Is…

Find out who won the most lucrative literary prize in Canada – the $100,000 Scotiabank Giller Prize!

 

And the Giller goes to … Fifteen Dogs by André Alexis: A tale about a wager between a pair of Greek gods that bestows human consciousness to a group of dogs in a Toronto shelter. The Toronto Star noted it’s, “teeming with existential reflections … In the same vein as George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Fifteen Dogs reveals universal truths about human nature by transferring consciousness and conscience to animals.” Alexis is no stranger to award success, winning the Books in Canada First Novel Award for his debut, Childhood, which also received a Giller nomination in 1998.

Recognized as Canada’s most prestigious literary award, the winner of the Giller Prize receives $100,000, and each finalist takes home $10,000. This year, the jury was composed of Irish author John Boyne (Jury Chair), Canadian writers Cecil Foster, Alexander MacLeod and Alison Pick, and British author Helen Oyeyemi.

This Year’s Contenders

Fifteen Dogs by André Alexis

Arvida by Samuel Archibald

Outline by Rachel Cusk

Daydreams of Angels by Heather O’Neill

Martin John by Anakana Schofield

Jack Rabinovitch founded The Giller Prize in 1994 in honour of his late wife Doris Giller, a literary journalist who died of cancer in April 1993. In this endeavor he was helped by several friends in the literary community, including the late Mordecai Richler (who won the prize in 1997) and recent Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro (who herself won the Giller in 1998 and 2004). In 2005, The Giller Prize teamed up with Scotiabank to create the Scotiabank Giller Prize, making it Canada’s richest literary award for fiction.