The Colophon

Griffin denies any conflict of interest between Anansi and Sutherland House.

An email dated October 8, 2025 and sent on behalf of Anansi publisher Karen Brochu outlines the changes.

If Thammavongsa were to win the prize, she would be the first author since Esi Edudgyan to win with back-to-back books.

Estima fills in the gaps in a richly imagined work of historical fiction.

Shah eschews the elevated pretensions of mock epic or otherwise self-indulgent poetry.

What MacIntyre ultimately sees in Tudor’s story is a cautionary tale about enablers of ruthless and anti-democratic authoritarian figures.

McIntyre’s book should serve as an inspiring corrective to anyone who believes that Canadian publishing is a failing endeavour.

Also shortlisted this year is Kiran Desai for The Loneliness of Sunny and Sonia.

Like Nabokov, Smith tackles difficult and potentially divisive sexual material.

The extent to which the body, for a queer Cree writer, is tied into an ongoing history of displacement, dispersal, and disappearance is at the centre of Belcourt’s writing.

Much of Cayley’s critique involves the suggestion that the CBC has become an insular clique catering only to those savvy enough to understand its references.

The shortlist was selected by a jury comprising writers Gary Barwin, Ali Bryan, and Jasmine Sealy.

For the second year in a row, the Giller is being judged by a three-person, all-Canadian jury.

“It’s so hard to get published if you’re writing from a racialized and marginalized identity.”

“We’re basically interested in anything speculative and outside the ordinary.”

Throughout, there is an unnerving focus on violence as core to the evangelical worldview.

Schneider does a good job of delineating the extent to which violent material has pervaded the history of music.

The festival organizers thanked the literary community for its feedback, saying they “take it seriously.”

The touchstone for Bad Juliet occurred during a vacation Blunt and his wife took to the Adirondacks.

Karafilly’s narrative places its two main characters in a situation that puts an extreme stress test on their already fractured marriage.

Iossel’s chosen technique has the paradoxical effect of simultaneously speeding the prose up and slowing it down.

Coyne argues that Canada “is not a fully functioning democracy.”

“There’s something to be said about the ‘you’ as a writer when you first start a manuscript and the ‘you’ as the editor when you finish it.”

Alexander MacLeod, Alistair’s son and a fellow M&S author, said he had “no knowledge of this change.”

Better not to include it in this series at all than to include it in even a mildly bowdlerized form.

This is, to put it mildly, a difficult time for an arts organization to be chasing funding.

“I very quickly realized that it didn’t need to change, I didn’t need to make it more traditional.”

The Hypebeast extends Khan’s interrogation of masculinity and machismo in immigrant communities.

This is not the first time Whitlock has contemplated a live conversation for his podcast.

Birrell employs a variation on Faulkner’s structure in As I Lay Dying.

Sutherland says the structure of the story was “a risk” that arose out of her belief that “every enslaved person deserves to have their story told with dignity.”

Certainly Canadian cultural nationalism does not look the same today as it did in 1968.

“It became really clear that Canadian publishers generally are not putting enough effort into the classics space.”

The Butcher’s Daughter may best be enjoyed by those unfamiliar with The String of Pearls or the musical Sweeney Todd.

The poems in National Animal do not cleave to unidirectional pieties about nature or the resilience of humankind.

Numerous chapters address interdisciplinary practice and the value of working not just across genres but across academic fields of interest.

Ferrante’s tale shows the ongoing potential for the short form to continue to evolve outside a strictly mimetic mode.

Belcourt’s tactic in “lived experience” is to trouble this unquestioned notion of progress and urban gentrification.

Throughout the story, relationships between and among the characters are drawn in different shades.

The passage into manhood for Chibuike involves the shedding of innocent blood.

“Fiction is a more subtle and sophisticated revenge porn.”

Whittall manages a delicate balancing act: she addresses an incident of sexual assault without turning her story into a simple trauma narrative.

The critic Delbert Russell referred to the story as “a mordant criticism of the artificiality and emptiness of the life of the haute bourgeoisie of Quebec.”

The story focuses on Anju, an overweight racialized high school student who is relentlessly bullied by a group of popular white girls.

The idea of progress, and what it displaces, takes on a surreal aspect in “Burial Ground.”

Gasco has endowed her story with something that is terribly unfashionable in book club circles and social media feeds: an unlikable narrator.

The shifting ground of motivation and relationship between the two characters is brought out metaphorically in the mummers’ costumes.

The speaker in the story is Azurée Ghiz, the descendent of Arab immigrants in Toronto.

Guérard’s novel gives the impression that the author is impatient with traditional narrative forms.

In Bailey’s case, his subject is virtually inexhaustible, because the setting is inexhaustible.

That democratic erosion, well underway when Goodman published his book in summer 2023, has only accelerated under a second Trump administration.

“The poet laureate role to me is to bring poetry to the people and the people to poetry.”

If there is any obvious hope to be found in the sombre and desolate poems on offer in this collection, it is in the perseverance of nature in the face of violence and peril.

Galway’s rich feel for language and her ability to inhabit a wide range of characters and milieus is impressive.

Bourrie transcends a simple biography and creates a snapshot of our riven historical moment.

The exact nature of the agreement remains obscure.

“There’s the one book I write, and then there are the million different books that people read.”

Each entry in the book contains, perhaps unsurprisingly, references to at least one dead writer.

Kirshner mounts a cogent and persuasive argument in favour of reevaluating the way society, and the popular culture that reflects it, considers sex work.

“I’m just giving voice to the part I haven’t read yet.”

Otok Bitek uses local folklore as a metaphorical way of bringing the girls’ experience into relief.

It’s not the idea of relevance itself that gives one pause, so much as where Sarian chooses to place the emphasis.

Penny pointed out that her decision to boycott the U.S. was not a reflection on the American public or her readers, but on the actions of the government in power.

These are not a young man’s verses; they are the ruminations of someone in the twilight of middle-age.

The text is a valuable examination of certain points of dissension or disagreement ongoing in our culture.

Barbara Kay took to the pages of the National Post to complain about the government having “wasted tax dollars on this values-void novel.”

It’s a wild, unconstrained tale that brings together, somewhat improbably, politicians and scofflaws, Bay Street business types and countercultural rebels, the Tragically Hip and Snoop Dogg.

Moral certitude makes for strange bedfellows.

Two jurors – Jordan Abel and Aaron Tucker – have been quietly scrubbed from the Giller Prize website.

The chaotic nature of the tariff rollout, while not surprising from the Trump administration, is nevertheless a challenge in trying to determine how best to respond.

The inaugural title in Spiderline’s “new direction” was An Ordinary Violence by Adriana Chartrand.

“When you look back in fifty years on the great writers in Canadian literature, I think he’s going to have to be included in that.”

Even in a year fraught with anxiety and discord, writers connected with readers to provide succour, solace, entertainment, and provocation.

Maysam Abu Khreibeh, a Palestinian writer and organizer, called the 2023 protest the “bare minimum” that could be done to push back against the ongoing conflict in Gaza

“I think the preservation of administrative salaries at the upper echelons is the priority.”

Sheung-King’s win completes the trifecta for Penguin Random House Canada, which published each of the three big fiction prize winners this year.

The counter-gala was organized by CanLit Responds and the activist group No Arms in the Arts.

Gordon Hill purchased PQL and will become a vertically integrated unit – a single company with two imprints.

M&S had a good day, also taking home the nonfiction prize in English.

“I think the majority of us – left, centre, right, whatever – are interested in finding a way out of this.”

There is ambiguity here, but also a plaintive recognition of very human emotions that are often denied or ignored by people frightened by their complexity or contradictions.

“It’s clear that the lines between what is public and what’s private has been blurred,” said Elana Rabinovitch.

“I would turn your attention back to the role of literature in situations like this, which is to interrogate hate and certitude and ideas that people are conflicted about.”

Sharp shares with Jon Klassen an affection for macabre conclusions in which the story’s villain gets an exaggerated, though not unwarranted, comeuppance.

“The problem in this country is that people seem to feel that if it’s funny it’s not serious.”

With fully three-fifths of the nominations, the Giller shortlist continues the hot streak for Penguin Random House Canada.

Also of note is the publication dates of these books, none of which was published after February 2024.

Maillard says he was “moved … humbled and grateful” to find out he had received the award.

For a writer who notably eschews the aesthetic approaches involved in social realism, Kilworthy Tanner is his most reader-friendly work to date.

The two other nominees for this year’s prize also appear on the Giller longlist.

The most blazingly unforgettable tale in the anthology has to be EC Dorgan’s “Prairie Teeth.”

A reader like Brand, we understand, is someone who has never felt represented in the literature presented to her as the great and enduring work of the past.

The campaign of intimidation has led to the Giller Foundation taking the extraordinary step of releasing a public plea for the harassment to end.

The refusal to cut ties with Scotiabank but merely suppress its name in public is likely to further inflame those who feel the association with the bank is a moral stain on the prize.

As a commercial novel about the ultra-rich, The Plus One wants to have it both ways.

Siebert’s empathetic approach to her material is admirable and she has the capacity for cutting observation.

The chimes between Europe of the 1930s and American in the 2010s and early 2020s are clear and persuasive.

Jones’s preference for selecting elder statesmen and women generally omits a broad range of voices that have helped push Canadian poetry out of the confines of its colonial past.

The Newfoundland of Vigil is an unforgiving place, and Taylor treats it, along with her cast of characters, without an ounce of sentimentality.

Owen is a lyric poet who delights in working within traditional forms.