Five authors are vying for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, one of the biggest in Canadian literature with $100,000 as the top prize. The topics explored in the nominated works of fiction – chosen out of a total 132 works submitted – range from the global refugee crisis to women's resilience to the meaning of home and family.
Ahead of the winner announcement on Nov. 8, Perspectives asked each of the shortlisted Canadian authors the same four questions.
Click on the names below to read their answers and get to know the nominees:
Omar El Akkad for his novel What Strange Paradise
Angélique Lalonde for her story collection Glorious Frazzled Beings
Cheluchi Onyemelukwe-Onuobia for her novel The Son of The House
Jordan Tannahill for his novel The Listeners
Miriam Toews for her novel Fight Night
Nominated work: Novel What Strange Paradise, published by McClelland & Stewart, an imprint of Penguin Random House Canada
What was the inspiration for your book?
The inspiration for my book came in 2012. I was still working as a reporter for the Globe and Mail, and I was in Egypt covering the aftermath of the Arab Spring. I was born in Egypt. That's where I spent the first five years of my life, and I was riding around town with an old high school friend who was complaining about the most universal thing in the world: rent, rent’s too high. I asked him how much the rent was for an apartment in his building. He said, “Well, do you mean the local price, or do you mean the Syrians’ price?” I said, “What do you mean the Syrians’ price?” He said, “Well, we had this influx of refugees coming in from Syria and you can charge them three times as much. I mean, what are they going to do? Go somewhere else?” It was one of those moments where you are given a glimpse of insight into how necessary the ruthless exploitation of the most vulnerable has become to the kind of society we have set up, by which I mean capitalism and the aftereffects of colonialism. It got me thinking about the sort of things that eventually would congeal into the novel that turned out to be What Strange Paradise.
What drew you to become a writer?
Fiction was my first home long before I became a journalist. At the age of five or six, I wrote my first short story. The teacher decided to print a copy in the student newsletter, and I was hooked. It's my first love. It's one of the very few things that I do with any degree of competence. I'm one of those people who doesn't have a very good answer to the question, “Where are you from?” I was born in one place, but I left when I was five. I grew up in Qatar, but I could never become a citizen of Qatar. I moved to Canada but not until I was 16. Now, I live in the US. And I think for people who have that kind of very unstable footing, in terms of background, fiction is a very comforting place to be because you get to move the contours of your invented world to fit whatever the nature of your experience is. And so, from a young age, I made the distinction that home was not a place, home was a relationship and my central relationship was going to be with the act of telling a story. I was a kid, I did not put it in those terms, but I think that's what drew me to that world. But I also happen to come from a part of the world where the idea of becoming a writer, a painter, an artist of any kind, is something you do in your spare time. You become a lawyer or engineer, you go into business. That stayed with me well into my time in Canada, and I ended up doing a degree in computer science. I can't program my way out of a paper bag. I never went to class. What I did do was spend all my time at the student newspaper and I was fortunate enough to build up enough of a portfolio that I landed a summer internship at the Globe and Mail the year I graduated, and I was fortunate again to be hired on full time. And that's where I spent the next 10 years of my life. But during that time, I wrote fiction continuously. I wrote three novels before publishing American War in my spare time, working between sort of midnight and 4:00 AM. After I sold American War, I thought, “This is your chance to do what you've wanted to do with your life.” So I quit the Globe and now I make things up for a living, predominantly.
What’s your favourite book that you didn’t write?
From a beauty of language and emotional precision point of view, my favorite novel line for line is A Death in the Family by James Agee. It was published posthumously, and it's basically about a family whose husband/father figure dies suddenly and the emotional resonance of that, the ripple effects of that. I read it shortly after my own father had died, and as a work, there's a kind of emotional autopsy of how somebody copes with that immediate infusion of negative space − all that isn't there anymore. I think it's one of the finest things I've ever read. That book always stands out in my mind.
What would winning this award mean for you?
It's a difficult question to answer because almost as an emotional self-defence mechanism I've tried either not to think about it or to think about it as an abstract thing. It would be life-changing on many different counts, obviously. It already has been life-changing to be mentioned in the same breath as these exceptional authors, both on the short list and the long list. Writing is very lonely work. You sit in a room alone for years at a time, not knowing if the thing you are creating whole cloth is going to mean anything or is going to resonate with anyone. And so to be in a position with these authors whose work I adore, with these judges whose work I adore, and to even be mentioned in the same sentence as this calibre of work is one of the finest antidotes to that loneliness. More than anything, that's the way I think about it. You're out in the wilderness for a long time and this is a form of coming back to something comforting. It would mean an immense amount and it already has meant an immense amount.
Nominated work: Story collection Glorious Frazzled Beings, published by House of Anansi
What was the inspiration for your book?
Because the collection is written over about a four-year period and it is a collection of stories, inspiration came from a lot of different places. But the thing that draws them together, that I bring out in the collection, is the theme of home. The different ways that we make, break, keep and find home is a binding thread and the source of inspiration for the collection as a whole. For me, the relationship between home and the place that we inhabit, and in particular the land that we’re on, is something that I spent a lot of time thinking about. A lot of my inspiration comes, in particular, from the land that I happen to be on.
What drew you to become a writer?
I've been writing for as long as I can remember, since I was a very small child. I can still remember making my first book when I was about six years old. I think it was a school project where we were supposed to tell a story about ourselves, our families and our imagined futures. I just remember the joy I had in making that book and how it felt both serious and playful at the same time. For me, I think that's a thread that has continued on throughout my life, where I've always written, no matter what else I was doing. That's something that's always followed me along and sometimes that has taken the form of poetry, essays, short fiction, graphic stories. Now, I’m living with two small children, and I found that once my time got constricted more, I was pushing all the time to try to create more time to write. It’s emerged as a really important piece of my own identity and my life. It’s something that I'm drawn to and feel is missing if it isn't happening.
What’s your favourite book that you didn’t write?
If I pick a book from any time I would pick Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, and a more recent book is Florida by Lauren Groff. The Left Hand of Darkness is just such an interesting book to me. Ursula K. Le Guin’s father was an anthropologist and I have a PhD in anthropology. So, I always appreciate in her work how she takes a really curious look around culture and the different possibilities for being, and for different kind of ways of expressing humanness or our personhood that can take form. And in Left Hand of Darkness, there are people who have no gender or who can switch gender throughout their lives, and I found that such an interesting concept to think through and think about. When I first read it, I remember really being blown away by her imagination and the way she explores social issues in a fantastical way that still is really rooted in our own experience. Lauren Groff, I think her writing in general just blows me away. She has one story about a character in a hurricane and as I was reading it, I felt like I was in that room in the hurricane. When I came out of the story and walked outside, I felt surprised that I wasn't in a hurricane. It's something about the power and the descriptive quality and the preciseness of her language that I admire and would aspire to.
What would winning this award mean for you?
Just making the longlist was such an honour, and I felt so grateful to see my name there with a list of books and authors who I admire and would aspire to have my book included amongst. The jurors that are on the panel this year are people I admire. Making the short list is amazing. It’s surreal, so I’m still processing that. Of course, winning the prize would be a life-changing thing for me. It would allow me to have paid writing time, where I could − instead of working to support my family, work that takes away from the time I have to write − devote myself to the craft I really want to be doing. It would be such a precious gift, but even just being on the short list is a really precious gift. I'm honoured.
Nominated work: Novel The Son of The House, published by Dundurn Press
What was the inspiration for your book?
Looking back on it, I was tinkering with the idea of writing about women and the challenges that I saw growing up, and that after I had grown up, I found that I wasn't a hundred per cent immune to them. A more direct inspiration was a story my mom told me about something that happened when I was growing up about this young child who, for a little while anyway, grew up with us. The circumstances under which he came to live with us, very briefly, were quite troubling to me. The mother had married into this family and when her husband died, the family took the child. Eventually they tried to hide the child in the homes of different relatives. My mom said that the boy’s mother should have understood she was marrying an only son and therefore it was to be expected that the family would do what they needed to do to keep hold of the child. It really struck me that it was a given that this would be the case. That sense of being in a framework where we've all sort of bought into it, and this is the way it is. I think these were things that had that been seething inside, and they found a way to come out in this story.
What drew you to become a writer?
I would say it was a combination of two things, the storytelling that went on in my family, as well as reading a lot of novels and children's books. When I was growing up, my dad told us a lot of stories. We looked forward to story time, particularly folk tales and storytelling about things that were happening in the family. My parents, my father in particular, were really good at that. I also started reading quite early and loved reading books. That's what really got me into writing. Reading from a young age and finding what is fascinating about human beings and trying to live through other peoples’ problems and challenges.
What’s your favourite book that you didn’t write?
I have so many favourite books, I don't even know where to start. I’m emotionally attached to lots of books, the classics. For example, I buy Jane Eyre every single place I find it. I probably have six or seven copies. I’m reading two books at the moment. I'm reading The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma and I'm also reading an old favourite, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s book Love in the Time of Cholera. There are so many other books that feel like siblings. As an African, I will always talk about Arrow of God and Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe.
What would winning this award mean for you?
It's too hard to imagine. I'm just going along and really enjoying the ride. For a book that I really struggled to get into the world, to win this would be absolutely mind blowing. It's a book about women in a certain part of Nigeria and it's being embraced by people across cultures, in settings that are very different, and the themes resonate with them. I feel like it already has won. Obviously, it would be terrific to win. I'm still pinching myself at being on the short list with such accomplished writers. Being shortlisted, being listed at all, has put this book out into a space where more and more people can read it. That's what every writer wants.
Nominated work: Novel The Listeners, published by HarperCollins Canada
What was the inspiration for your book?
I first read about the hum seven or eight years ago. For context, The Hum is this global phenomena that's been reported since the early 1970s. Thousands of cases have been reported, often localized around certain cities or regions. Certain hums begin to develop names like the Bristol Hum here in the UK, or the Taos Hum in New Mexico, or the Windsor Hum, one of the first ones I heard about, which was in Ontario. Some of the hums are often traced to industrial white noise sources. Like in the case of Windsor, it was traced to a blast furnace in a steel factory in Detroit.
Others are more mysterious, where there's no source that's ultimately found. I think that mystery intrigued me, and there's a number of natural theories and hypotheses that have been put forward by various researchers. Many of them have sort of sublime or lyrical dimensions to them. There's a team of French scientists who suggest that perhaps The Hum is caused by waves rolling against the floor of the ocean and then concussing against the continental shelf. The book posits that there's a buildup of electromagnetic charge in the cavity between the ionosphere and Earth's surface, caused by the millions of lightning strikes that hit Earth every day, and then that creates a kind of resonant frequency. Those theories captured my imagination, but they're all still inconclusive.
What specifically intrigued me, from a narrative point of view, was that I read certain individuals would hear The Hum, and sometimes their family members would not. So, there'd be only one person in the household that would suffer from The Hum, and that hearing The Hum caused sometimes very severe side effects like depression, anxiety, insomnia, and nosebleeds. This narrative emerged of a woman who alone hears this hum in her household and begins to feel increasingly isolated from her family and friends because of it. They empathize with her, but probably think that it's some kind of psychosomatic condition. The immense relief she feels when she eventually discovers that one of her students can also hear the hum, creates this unlikely and intimate bond between them, as her marriage and ultimately her job is falling apart. That’s the first seed of the idea, the narrative that first presented itself. Then it took me years to figure out how to best tell that story.
What drew you to become a writer?
I began writing short stories and poems from a very young age. And for me, one of the very first things that I began doing kind of consistently around the age of 12 was writing plays. I wrote a lot of plays through high school and put them on with friends and just continued to do that through university. And then after university, at some point I started making enough money from doing that, that I could sustain myself. But I never really stopped making plays with friends, and that became the thing I became best known for, in Toronto. And it's only been really in the past four years that I've been writing novels.
What’s your favourite book that you didn’t write?
The book that I wish I had written − but I probably would never be able to because I don't think anyone could write it as well as Andrea Lawlor did − is a fairly recent novel called Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl. It's this incredible story of Paul who’s this sort of shape-shifting, gender-shifting character, who goes by he in the book. It's about his journey, but also him coming to realize that he can change his body at will. The book tracks his journey through America through the 90s alongside the advent of AIDS, but also grunge culture and third-wave feminism and queer liberation. It's a really joyful and sexy book.
What would winning this award mean for you?
Just being a finalist has already been life-changing. Winning would be an extraordinary vote of confidence. I think all writers, no matter how successful they are, struggle with feelings of self-doubt at times. And I certainly have, having never trained as a writer, coming to novel writing by way of a different form. I sometimes think I'm just an interloper in this world. So, it would be an amazing vote of confidence and certainly the financial implications would allow me to be able to focus on just being a writer, which is a great privilege and gift.
Nominated work: Novel Fight Night, published by Knopf Canada, an imprint of Penguin Random House Canada
What was the inspiration for your book?
My grandchildren were my inspiration. I have four of them now. They were all born in quick succession, starting in 2017. I wanted to write something that would make them laugh, later in life, if they read it, and something that might help to assuage fears they might have and might help to answer some of the questions they'll probably have about our family, and about difficult, painful things and survival, what it takes, and particularly about their great-grandmother, who is our tough and joyful, scarred and resilient leader in life, and who will very likely not be around too much longer. And so, I tried to create a fiction around all of that, narrated by a nine-year-old girl called Swiv.
What drew you to become a writer?
I don't honestly know what drew me to become a writer. It's just something I've always done. Writing is a necessary thing, for me. My father and my sister and my grandmother were writers, and now both my kids are, too. Maybe it's a genetic thing, something we inherited somehow, the need to craft narrative, to tell stories, for others but also for ourselves, to make sense of things, and from a desire to make art.
What’s your favourite book that you didn’t write?
There are so, so many! I'll say Random Family, by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc. It's non-fiction, and journalistically objective, but it reads like the best kind of novel. Adrian Nicole LeBlanc spent most of ten years living with a family in the Bronx and documenting their lives and struggles. It's a brilliant, original book.
What would winning this award mean for you?
Winning the Giller prize would buy me time, precious time, that I'm running out of, and that would allow me to continue with my work. It would also be an incredible honour, a mark of recognition from fellow writers, my peers.
These interviews have been edited and condensed.
Read the bios of the Giller Prize shortlisted authors and the first chapter of their nominated works here.
On Nov. 4 at 8 p.m., Watch these authors answer questions and read their books during the free virtual event Between the Pages: An Evening with the Scotiabank Giller Prize Finalists.
On Nov. 8 at 9 p.m., the prize winner will be announced during the Scotiabank Giller Prize broadcast on CBC, presented commercial-free by Scotia Wealth Management.