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For Immediate Release: Wednesday January 14th, 2015, 9:00 a.m. EST Introducing the Five-Member Jury Panel for the 2015 Scotiabank Giller Prize January 14, 2015 (Toronto, ON) – Elana Rabinovitch, Executive Director of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, today announced that for the first time in its history, the prize has appointed a jury panel of five individuals. The jury members for the 2015 Scotiabank Giller Prize are: John Boyne (Jury Chair) "Expanding from three to five people gives the jury a chance to stretch a bit, allows for more and different perspectives and injects new vigour into the quality of the deliberations," said Elana Rabinovitch about the change. "Bringing more readers into the mix, gifted individuals with varied backgrounds and voices, is bound to bring a different level of discernment to the conversation about the books." A bit about the 2015 jury:
John Boyne was born in Dublin, Ireland, and is the author of nine novels for adults and four for younger readers, most famously The Boy In The Striped Pajamas, which sold more than 6 million copies worldwide and was made into an award-winning Miramax feature film. John's adult novels include the international bestsellers The House of Special Purpose and The Absolutist. His most recent novel, A History of Loneliness, was shortlisted for Ireland's premier literary award, the Irish Novel of the Year. He has won three Irish Book Awards, several international prizes, and has been inducted into the Hennessy Literary Awards Hall of Fame. His novels are translated into more than 45 languages.
Cecil Foster is the author of 12 books including five critically acclaimed novels. Foster's latest book, Independence, was published in 2014. Sleep On, Beloved was shortlisted for the 1995 Ontario Trillium Award and No Man in the House (1991) aired frequently on CBC Radio's Between the Covers. Other works include Blackness and Modernity: The Colour of Humanity and the Quest for Freedom (2007), which won the John Porter Tradition of Excellence Book Award in 2008, and Genuine Multiculturalism: Tragedy and Comedy of Diversity(2014). A Place Called Heaven: The Meaning of Being Black in Canada(1996) won the 1997 Gordon Montador Award. Currently on leave as a professor at the University of Guelph, Foster is a professor and interim chair in the Department of Transnational Studies at SUNY, Buffalo. He resides in Toronto and Buffalo, NY.
Alexander MacLeod is a writer and an associate professor of English literature at Saint Mary's University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. His first collection of short stories, Light Lifting, won an Atlantic Book Award and was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, The Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, The Commonwealth Writers' Prize (Best First Book, Canada and the Caribbean) and the Thomas Head Raddall Fiction Award. The collection was also longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal Award for Excellence in Fiction and was named a "Book of the year" by the American Library Association, the Globe and Mail, Amazon.ca, and Quill and Quire. His scholarly research focuses on theories of cultural geography and social space in contemporary Canadian and American fiction.
Helen Oyeyemi is author of five novels, including White is for Witching, which won a 2010 Somerset Maugham Award, Mr Fox, winner of a 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and most recently Boy, Snow, Bird. In 2013, Oyeyemi was named one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists. She lives in Prague.
Alison Pick is the author of the best-selling memoir Between Gods, a Top Book of 2014 at the Globe and Mail and the CBC, and nominee for the BC National Non-Fiction Award. Her novel Far to Go was nominated for the Man Booker Prize, and won the Canadian Jewish Book Award for Fiction. It was a Top 10 Book of 2010 at NOW Magazine and the Toronto Star. Between Gods and Far to Gowere both published internationally. Alison has won several awards, among them the 2002 Bronwen Wallace Award for most promising writer under 35 in Canada, the 2003 CBC Literary Award for Poetry and the 2005 National Magazine Award for Poetry. She is currently on Faculty at the Humber School for Writers and the 2015 Iceland Writers Retreat. The recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, Alison lives and works in Toronto. This year marks the twenty-second anniversary of the prize. Hi-res images of the 2015 jurors are available for download on the Media Resources page at www.scotiabankgillerprize.ca. Kobo has generously donated a Kobo Aura eReader to each member of the 2015 jury panel. The Scotiabank Giller Prize encourages publishers to provide digital copies of its submitted titles in addition to print books. The Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist will be announced in mid-September, 2015. This year's shortlist will be announced at a press event in Toronto on October 5, 2015. The winner will be named at a black-tie dinner and awards ceremony at Toronto's Ritz-Carlton on Tuesday, November 10, 2015. The 2015 submission package, including an updated submission schedule is now available at scotiabankgillerprize.ca/submissions About the Prize About Scotiabank -30- Media Inquiries:
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