What you need to know about the 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize finalists | CBC Books

Past winners include Souvankham Thammavongsa for How to Pronounce Knife, Esi Edugyan for Washington Black and Half-Blood Blues, Margaret Atwood for Alias Grace, Ian Williams for Reproduction and Alice Munro for Runaway.

This year’s ceremony will be co-hosted by poet Rupi Kaur and actor Paul Sun-Hyung Lee. 

The show will be broadcast on CBC TV, CBC Gem, CBC Listen and CBC Radio at 9 p.m. local time (11:30 AT/12 midnight NT) and will be streamed online at CBC Books, YouTube and Facebook at 9 p.m. ET.

Kaur is a bestselling poet from Brampton, Ont. Her poetry collections are milk and honey, the sun and her flowers and home body, all of which have made the New York Times bestseller list and have sold more than eight million copies worldwide.

Sun-Hyung Lee is an actor and comedian best known for his roles on CBC’s Kim Convenience and Disney’s The Mandalorian. He recently championed the novel Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots on Canada Reads 2021.

Canadian writer Zalika Reid-Benta is chairing the five-person jury this year. Joining her are Canadian writers Megan Gail Coles and Joshua Whitehead, Malaysian writer Tash Aw and American writer Joshua Ferris.

The jury read 132 books, narrowed it down to a longlist of 12 and then a shortlist of five. They chose a shortlist of four novels and one short story collection.

Read more about each of the finalists below.

What Strange Paradise is a novel that tells the story of a global refugee crisis through the eyes of a child. Nine-year-old Amir is the only survivor from a ship full of refugees coming to a small island nation. He ends up with a teenage girl named Vanna, who lives on the island. Even though they don’t share a common language or culture, Vanna becomes determined to keep Amir safe. What Strange Paradise tells both their stories and how they each reached this moment, while asking the questions, “How did we get here?” and “What are we going to do about it?”

“It’s a repurposed fable. It’s the story of Peter Pan inverted and recast as the story of a contemporary child refugee,” El Akkad said in an interview with CBC Books.

I write about what makes me angry, but me being angry about it is not enough.– Omar El Akkad

“For the duration of my 10 years as a journalist, and now my second career as an author, I have been overwhelmingly a tourist in someone else’s misery… I write about what makes me angry, but me being angry about it is not enough… The act of writing the story is hope.”

El Akkad is a Canadian journalist and author who currently lives in Portland. He is also the author of the novel American War, which was defended on Canada Reads 2018 by actor Tahmoh Penikett.

From the book: The child lies on the shore. All around him the beach is littered with the wreckage of the boat and the wreckage of its passengers: shards of decking, knapsacks cleaved and gutted, bodies frozen in unnatural contortion. Dispossessed of nightfall’s temporary burial, the dead ferment indecency. There’s too much of spring in the day, too much light.

Facedown, with his arms outstretched, the child appears from a distance as though playing at flight. And so too in the bodies that surround him, though distended with seawater and hardening, there flicker the remnants of some silent levitation, a severance from the laws of being.

The sea is tranquil now; the storm has passed. The island, despite the debris, is calm. A pair of plump orange-necked birds, stragglers from a northbound flock, take rest on the lamppost from which hangs one end of a police cordon. In the breaks between the wailing of the sirens and the murmur of the onlookers, they can be heard singing. The species is not unique to the island nor the island to the species, but the birds, when they stop here, change the pitch of their songs. The call is an octave higher, a sharp, throat-scraping thing.

Giller Prize jury citation: “Amid all the anger and confusion surrounding the global refugee crisis, Omar El Akkad’s What Strange Paradise paints a portrait of displacement and belonging that is at once unflinching and tender. In examining the confluence of war, migration and a sense of settlement, it raises questions of indifference and powerlessness and, ultimately, offers clues as to how we might reach out empathetically in a divided world.”

LISTEN | Omar El Akkad discusses What Strange Paradise:

In the short story collection Glorious Frazzled Beings, human and more-than-human worlds come together in places we call home. Among other tales, a ghost tends to the family garden, a shape-shifting mother deals with the complexities of love when one son is born with beautiful fox ears and another is not and a daughter tries to make sense of her dating profile after her mom dies.

“As I was going through [the stories], the larger theme of ‘home’ came out,” Lalonde said in an interview with CBC Books.

Home can be a place where we feel calm and healing, but it can also be a place of strife, fear and trauma.– Angélique Lalonde

“Home is a complex place. Sometimes home isn’t a great place to be. Home can be a place where we feel calm and healing, but it can also be a place of strife, fear and trauma.”

Lalonde is a B.C. writer whose work has been featured in PRISM International, the Journey Prize Anthology, Room and the Malahat Review, among other publications. She received the 2019 Writers’ Trust Journey Prize and was nominated for a National Magazine Award. She was awarded an emerging writer’s residency at the Banff Centre. She lives in northern B.C. and holds a PhD in anthropology from the University of Victoria.

From the book: The lady with the big head is out there in the misty morning. Is she wearing a veil? What is she doing in my garden? The mist is sitting on the river, slightly spread over the land. I see the mountain beyond, and the lady with the big head stooped over my onions. Not like yesterday when the mist was so thick I wouldn’t have seen her if she had been there.

Was she out there yesterday, picking calendula seeds to save for next season? She didn’t ask me if she could tend my garden while I was in the house doing other things. She’s never talked to me at all. She avoids me if I try to approach her, floating off into the mist or the memory of mist, then reappearing later doing different things in different places. I saw her digging at an anthill with the bear that has been hanging around our yard. She used a stick and the bear used her big broad paws.

The lady with the big head was helping the bear, or the bear was helping the lady with the big head, I’m not sure which. Either way, they were digging up the anthill near the apple tree. I didn’t mind that. I had noticed the ants were in the sickly tree crawling all around and that probably was not a good sign, so maybe the lady with the big head and the bear were helping the apple tree too.

Giller Prize jury citation: “Menopausal gods, procreating droids and boys born as foxes are only a modest few of the glorious frazzled beings that populate Angelique Lalonde’s astonishing story collection. Many of the ever-present concerns of the contemporary world — ecology, capital, conservation, gender fluidity, addiction, inequality, Indigenous displacement and the eternal limits of human perspective — find in Lalonde a beguiling literary voice equal to the age, pushing not only at the boundaries of literature but at those of articulation and being. Lalonde gravitates here to the fable and the fairy tale, familiar and estranging in equal measure, to claw at the divide between our world and others — the animal, the alien — while inevitably falling back on, and forgiving, the ever-flawed human being.”

The Son of the House is the story of two Nigerian women, the housemaid Nwabulu and the wealthy Julie. The two live very different lives, but are brought together when they are kidnapped and forced to spend days together in a dark, tiny room. Nwabulu and Julie find common ground and keep hope alive by sharing stories from their lives.

“I was extremely deliberate. I’m gratified by the response to this book in Nigeria, in Igboland, where I come from originally. It has resonated with people, it tells things as they are. There’s nothing contrived about it. The idea is the language, the context and the experience is something that people can come and engage with,” Onyemelukwe-Onuobia said in an interview with CBC Books.

I wrote it for human beings just like me, regardless of different cultures, different settings.– Cheluchi Onyemelukwe-Onuobia

“I wrote it for human beings just like me, regardless of different cultures, different settings. Underneath all of that, we still have the same hopes and dreams — we all want to find love and to be happy.”

Onyemelukwe-Onuobia is a lawyer, academic and writer who divides her time between Lagos and Halifax. The Son of the House is her first novel.

From the book: I had been a housemaid for nearly half my life when I met Urenna.

My first sojourn as a housemaid began when I was 10. That morning, before it was fully day, I went by myself on a big bus, the kind that went to Lagos. I went to live with Papa Emma and his wife. I would do little chores around the house and I would be sent to school. That was what Mama Nkemdilim told me. I was excited to go, a little apprehensive too, but I knew that anywhere would be better than living with Mama Nkemdilim after my father had died. And Lagos was the biggest city in Nigeria — everyone knew that. Mama Nkemdilim said men who had gone from our village either married Yoruba women and never came back, or they came back smelling of money and comfort.

It was no surprise that Mama Nkemdilim would send me away at the first opportunity that knocked on our door.

Giller Prize jury citation: “It is a delightful gift to find a book you feel fortunate to have read, akin to discovering a treasure. That is the case with The Son of the House. The novel explores issues of patriarchy and classism, themes of friendship and loss through the lenses of two very different yet unexpectedly connected women in Nigeria. Cheluchi Onyemelukwe-Onuobia writes a modern novel with fairytale elements and prose that punches you in the gut, leaving you wonderfully stunned by the time the book is finished.”

LISTEN | Cheluchi Onyemelukwe-Onuobia discusses The Son of the House:

In the novel The Listeners, Claire Devon is one of a disparate group of people who can hear a low hum. No one in her house can hear it, and this sound has no obvious source or medical cause, but it starts upsetting the balance of Claire’s life. She strikes up a friendship with one of her students who can also hear the hum. Feeling more and more isolated from their families and colleagues, they join a neighbourhood self-help group of people who can also hear the hum, which gradually transforms into something much more extreme, with far-reaching and devastating consequences. 

“It really began with me initially reading about the hum in Windsor and then kind of beginning to extrapolate from there,” Tannahill said in an interview with The Next Chapter.

I began thinking very much of this idea of the hysterical subject, this very gendered figure throughout history.– Jordan Tannahill

“I began thinking very much of this idea of the hysterical subject, this very gendered figure throughout history. A woman’s symptoms and ailments have often been disregarded and dismissed as psychosomatic or hysterical or what have you.”

Tannahill is a playwright, filmmaker, author and theatre director. He has twice won the Governor General’s Literary Award for drama: in 2014 for Age of Minority and in 2018 for Botticelli in the Fire & Sunday in Sodom. He is also the author of the novel Liminal.

From the book: The chances are that you have, at some point, stumbled upon the viral meme of me screaming naked in front of a bank of news cameras; a moment of sheer abandon forever rendered as a GIF, pasted in comment threads and text messages the world over. The chances are that you have also seen the coverage of the tragic events that unfolded thereafter on Sequoia Crescent. And the chances are that you probably think of me as some brainwashed cultist, or conspiracy theorist. I wouldn’t blame you for believing these things, or any of the other wildly sensationalized stories that have circulated in the days, weeks, and months since.

The truth is that I am a mother, and a wife, and a former high school English teacher who now teaches ESL night classes at the library near my house. I love my family fiercely. My daughter, Ashley, is the most important person in my life. You read about parents disowning their transgender sons, or refusing to speak to their daughters for marrying a Jew, or not marrying a Jew, and I think — well that’s just barbarism. Faith is basically a mental illness if it makes you do something so divorced from your natural instincts as a parent. I remember holding Ashley when she was about 45 seconds old, before she had even opened her eyes, when she was just this slimy little mole-thing, nearly a month premature, and I remember thinking I would literally commit murder for this creature. As I held her I imagined all of the joy and pleasure she would feel, all of the pain that I would not and could not protect her from, and it completely overwhelmed me. I imagined the men who would hurt her one day, and I imagined castrating them one by one with my bare hands. All of this before she was a minute old! So no, I have never understood how anyone could ever put any creed or ideology before their love of their child — and yet, this is precisely what Ashley accused me of doing in the year lead- ing up to the events on Sequoia Crescent.

Giller Prize jury citation: “The Listeners is at once a revery for the sublime, for the innocuous tapestry of sounds that make up the rhythms of our lives — and the pollution of sounds that can tear and devour. It is at once a masterful interrogation of the body, as well as the desperate violence that undergirds our lives in the era of social media, conspiracies, isolation and environmental degradation. Tannahill writes as both poet and playwright, millennial and philosopher, as one who trains his reader to attune to the frequency of ‘the Hum’ to experience a rich hinterland beyond our embodied senses, beyond our perceptions of grace or faith. I leave listening, even to the silences, which are always screaming, and posit myself in my cochlea, forever now a conch, flaring and reeling, primordially.”

LISTEN | Jordan Tannahill discusses The Listeners:

Miriam Toews’s novel, Fight Night, takes the form of a nine-year-old’s letter to her absent father. Expelled from school for fighting, Swiv keeps a detailed record of life at home — from her irrepressible, sports fan grandmother, Elvira, who takes on the role of homeschool teacher, to her pregnant mother’s fight for her mental health. Swiv’s entries explore the crushing impact of mental illness, the patriarchal attitudes embedded in fundamentalist religion and, above all, the will to live a good life across three generations of women in a close-knit family.

“I remember being eight. I was a very carefree, happy-go-lucky, playful eight-year-old. Then I turned nine and something happened … like a switch went off in my head. I thought, ‘Really? What the hell is going on here? What the hell is going on here with my family, with my town, with the world, with me?’ It was an entry into the story. I thought, ‘Oh, that’s a good base to tell the story from and through Swiv’s eyes,'” Toews said in an interview on The Next Chapter.

I remember being eight. I was a very carefree, happy-go-lucky, playful eight-year-old. Then I turned nine and something happened.– Miriam Toews

Toews is a writer originally from Steinbach, Man., who now lives in Toronto. Her novel A Complicated Kindness won the Governor General’s Literary Award for English-language fiction in 2004 and Canada Reads in 2006. She is also the author of the novel All My Puny Sorrows, Women Talking and memoir Swing Low.

From the book:

Dear Dad,

How are you? I was expelled. Have you ever heard of Choice Time? That’s my favourite class.

I do Choice Time at the Take-Apart Centre, which is the place in our classroom where we put on safety goggles and take things apart. It’s a bit dangerous. The first half of the class we take things apart and then Madame rings a bell, which means it’s the second half of the class and we’re supposed to put things back together.

It doesn’t make sense because it takes way longer to put things back together than take them apart. I tried to talk to Mom about it, and she said I should just start putting things back together sooner, before Madame rings the bell, but when I did that Madame told me I had to wait for the bell.

I told Madame about the problem with time but she didn’t like my tone, which was a lashing out tone, which I’m supposed to be working on. Mom is in her third trimester. She’s cracking up. Gord is trapped inside her. I asked her what she wanted for her birthday and she said a cold IPA and a holiday. Grandma lives with us now. She has one foot in the grave. She’s not afraid of anything.

Giller Prize jury citation: “Miriam Toews’ compellingly crafted Fight Night is a testament to her astounding grasp of narrative voice. The emotional range exemplified on every page solidifies Toews as one of our most endearing, compassionate and prolific storytellers. Her young protagonist, nine-year-old Swiv, is expertly rendered with exacting grit and enviable humour. To read this examination of girlhood, family and mental wellness, is to become wholly enamoured with a cast of characters consistently demonstrating the power of exuberance and resiliency of love.”

LISTEN | Miriam Toews discusses Fight Night: