Reading List · Literary Prizes
The Giller is the prize that tells you what Canada thinks is its best novel of the year, and for thirty years it did that under a bank’s name. The bank came off the title in September 2024 and stopped paying five months later. This year the prize has done something no literary prize has done before: handed the judging to nine independent booksellers, with no authors and no critics on the jury at all. The winner is announced on 16 November. Below is every winner since 2000, and the eleven since 2015 with the British edition named, because that is the part nobody writes down.
By Lisanne Swart · 27 winners since 2000 · 100,000 Canadian dollars, and a jury of booksellers · Last reviewed 15 September 2026
ClickTap a spine to jump to that book. Thammavongsa is there twice, at either end.
Fourteen books out of more than a hundred and forty submitted. Three to five make the shortlist, which is a narrower cut than most prizes allow themselves. 12
Quick answer
The Giller Prize is Canada’s biggest award for fiction, founded in 1994 by Jack Rabinovitch in memory of his wife, the literary journalist Doris Giller. It is worth 100,000 Canadian dollars, it goes to a novel, a story collection or a graphic novel by a Canadian, and Souvankham Thammavongsa won the last one. It lost its sponsor’s name in 2024 and the sponsor itself in 2025, and this year it is being judged by booksellers. Which of the winners you can actually buy in Europe is the question below.
How this page chooses
I started this page expecting to report that Giller winners are hard to get hold of outside Canada, because several of them come from presses of five or six people. That turned out to be wrong, and the page says so instead: every winner from 2015 to 2025 has a British edition, including both of the Coach House ones. The real problem is timing, not availability.
So the eleven below each carry their Canadian publisher and their British one, with the year the British edition landed where it came later. The full list back to 2000 is in the table, facts only. I have not read all twenty-seven, and where a “read it if” is missing it is because I had nothing useful to add.
Newest first. Both publishers are named because they are rarely the same house, and the British edition is the one you can order from here. 11
CanadaKnopf CanadaBritainBloomsbury, September 2025
A former boxer does other women’s nails for a living. The clients talk over her head as though the chair were empty, and she watches all of it. This is her first novel, and it makes her the only person to have won the Giller for both a story collection and a novel.
Read it ifyou want the current winner, and you like a narrator who misses nothing and says little.
CanadaMcClelland & StewartBritainBloomsbury
A wounded soldier on a battlefield in 1917, and then a hundred and fifteen years of consequences, in fragments that jump generations without stopping to explain themselves. Shortlisted for the Booker the same year.
Read it ifyou read poetry, or want a novel that behaves like it.
CanadaKnopf CanadaBritainGranta Books
A woman moves to a remote northern country to keep house for her brother. A sow smothers her litter, the potatoes fail, a dog goes into a phantom pregnancy — and the village begins to look at her. She narrates it all in a voice of relentless apology. Booker-shortlisted.
Read it ifyou can sit with a narrator you are never allowed to trust.
CanadaCoach House BooksBritainDialogue Books
Baxter works the sleeping cars on a train crossing Canada in 1929, is not permitted to sleep, and is saving for dental school. He is Black and gay in a job where being noticed at all is dangerous. Published by Coach House, a Toronto press of a handful of people.
Read it ifyou want the proof that a tiny press can take this prize.
CanadaMcClelland & StewartBritainPicador, 2022
A boy washes up alive on a beach after a boat sinks, and a teenage girl on the island decides to hide him rather than hand him over. The chapters alternate between the night of the crossing and the day after it.
Read it ifyou want the one on this list that is hardest to put down.
CanadaMcClelland & StewartBritainBloomsbury, 2021
Fourteen stories about Laotian immigrants doing the jobs nobody writes about: a nail salon, a chicken plant, a worm farm. The title story is four pages long and it is about a girl whose father tells her the k is not silent.
Read it ifyou have half an hour and want to know immediately whether this prize is for you.
CanadaRandom House CanadaBritainDialogue Books
Felicia and Edgar meet beside their dying mothers in a Toronto hospital in the seventies. The form of the book keeps changing underneath you — pages that split into columns, then into numbered fragments — as the family it is describing grows.
Read it ifyou like a novel that argues with the shape of novels.
CanadaHarperCollins CanadaBritainSerpent’s Tail
An eleven-year-old boy on a Barbados sugar plantation is chosen as a scientist’s assistant, and then the two of them leave the ground in a hot-air balloon. Booker-shortlisted, and adapted for television in 2025. Edugyan’s second Giller.
Read it ifyou want the biggest story here, and you do not mind an ending people argue about.
CanadaDoubleday CanadaBritainNo Exit Press, 2018
Jean runs a bookshop in Toronto and is told by two separate customers that they have seen her double in the park across the street. She starts sitting in the park to wait for her. This is the hardest of the eleven to find in Britain: its UK publisher has since been absorbed into another house.
Read it ifyou want the strangest book on the list and do not mind hunting for a copy.
CanadaKnopf CanadaBritainGranta Books
Three musicians at the Shanghai Conservatory, the Cultural Revolution, and Tiananmen Square in 1989, held together by a handwritten manuscript that keeps being copied out and passed on. Booker-shortlisted.
Read it ifyou want the most ambitious novel of the eleven.
CanadaCoach House BooksBritainSerpent’s Tail
Apollo and Hermes make a bet in a Toronto bar: give fifteen dogs human intelligence and see whether even one of them dies happy. The dogs are in a veterinary clinic overnight when it takes. It goes about as well as you would expect.
Read it ifyou want a short book with an idea in it that will not leave.
Twenty-seven books in twenty-six years, because 2000 ended in a tie and never has again. The eleven in red have notes above. 411
| Year | Book | Author | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | Anil’s Ghost | Michael Ondaatje | Shared — the only tie in the prize’s history |
| 2000 | Mercy Among the Children | David Adams Richards | Shared |
| 2001 | Clara Callan | Richard B. Wright | |
| 2002 | The Polished Hoe | Austin Clarke | |
| 2003 | The In-Between World of Vikram Lall | M. G. Vassanji | His second, after the first-ever Giller in 1994 |
| 2004 | Runaway | Alice Munro | Her second; she won the Nobel nine years later |
| 2005 | The Time in Between | David Bergen | |
| 2006 | Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures | Vincent Lam | A story collection, and a first book |
| 2007 | Late Nights on Air | Elizabeth Hay | |
| 2008 | Through Black Spruce | Joseph Boyden | |
| 2009 | The Bishop’s Man | Linden MacIntyre | |
| 2010 | The Sentimentalists | Johanna Skibsrud | From Gaspereau Press, who set type by hand |
| 2011 | Half-Blood Blues | Esi Edugyan | Booker-shortlisted; published in Britain before Canada |
| 2012 | 419 | Will Ferguson | |
| 2013 | Hellgoing | Lynn Coady | A story collection |
| 2014 | Us Conductors | Sean Michaels | First year at the full 100,000 dollars |
| 2015 | Fifteen Dogs | André Alexis | Coach House Books |
| 2016 | Do Not Say We Have Nothing | Madeleine Thien | Booker-shortlisted |
| 2017 | Bellevue Square | Michael Redhill | |
| 2018 | Washington Black | Esi Edugyan | Her second; Booker-shortlisted |
| 2019 | Reproduction | Ian Williams | |
| 2020 | How to Pronounce Knife | Souvankham Thammavongsa | A story collection |
| 2021 | What Strange Paradise | Omar El Akkad | |
| 2022 | The Sleeping Car Porter | Suzette Mayr | Coach House Books |
| 2023 | Study for Obedience | Sarah Bernstein | Booker-shortlisted |
| 2024 | Held | Anne Michaels | Booker-shortlisted |
| 2025 | Pick a Colour | Souvankham Thammavongsa | Her second, and a first novel |
Fourteen books, announced on 8 September 2026 out of more than a hundred and forty submitted, and chosen by booksellers rather than writers. Nine of the fourteen come from independent Canadian presses. The shortlist on 5 October cuts this to between three and five. 1
A prize that lost its sponsor’s name and its sponsor eighteen months apart, and then gave the judging to shopkeepers.
Jack Rabinovitch, a Toronto businessman, founded the prize in 1994 in memory of his wife Doris Giller, a literary journalist at the Toronto Star who had died the year before. The first one went to M. G. Vassanji, who then won it again in 2003. It started at 25,000 dollars and reached its present 100,000 in 2014. 311
Scotiabank became lead sponsor in 2005 and the award was the Scotiabank Giller Prize for nineteen years. Protesters interrupted the televised ceremony in November 2023 over the bank’s holding in an Israeli arms manufacturer. In July 2024, forty-three writers — among them two previous winners — signed an open letter telling their publishers not to submit their books. 10
Then two separate things happened, and almost every account runs them together. On 4 September 2024 the bank’s name came off the prize, announced the same morning as that year’s longlist — while Scotiabank was still the lead sponsor and still paying. The two only parted company on 3 February 2025, five months later. So there was a full prize cycle funded by a bank whose name was no longer on it. 78
The Hilary and Galen Weston Foundation, mostly: a four million dollar multi-year gift announced on 10 August 2026, on top of an earlier million, funding author support, a national shortlist book tour and book-club programming. Other named supporters include Power Corporation and Margaret Atwood, who won the prize herself in 1996 — before this table starts. The 2025 gala was paid for by anonymous donors. There is still no naming sponsor and the foundation says it is looking. 9
For 2026 the jury is nine independent booksellers from seven shops across eight provinces and territories — Charlottetown, Halifax, Toronto, Mississauga, Brampton, Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Kelowna, Yellowknife. No authors. No critics. That has never happened before at this prize, and as far as I can find, not at any comparable one. The people who put the books in customers’ hands are choosing which book that is.
It is worth saying what this replaced. Juries used to be writers and critics, usually with one or two members from outside Canada; two international jurors resigned during the 2024 row, and every jury since has been entirely Canadian. 6
The author must be a Canadian citizen or permanent resident, and the book must be published in Canada in English inside the eligibility year. Novels, short story collections and graphic novels all count, and so do translations — with 70,000 to the author and 30,000 to the translator when one wins. Out: poetry, young adult, self-published, posthumous, and anything containing AI-generated text. Publishers submit, usually one book each. Previous winners may win again, which is how four people have two. 3
Five of the last ten Giller winners were also shortlisted for the Booker — and every time it was the same book: Half-Blood Blues, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, Washington Black, Study for Obedience and Held. No Giller winner has ever gone on to win the Booker for that book. If you want one reason to follow a Canadian prize from Europe, that is the reason: it keeps picking the same books a year early. 12
Where to go next on this site:
Souvankham Thammavongsa, for Pick a Colour, announced on 17 November 2025. It is her first novel, about a former boxer who works in a nail salon. She had already won the prize in 2020 for the story collection How to Pronounce Knife, which makes her the only writer to have taken the Giller for both a collection and a novel.
The winner is announced on Monday 16 November 2026 at a gala in Toronto, broadcast by CBC. The longlist of fourteen books came out on 8 September 2026, chosen from more than 140 submissions, and the shortlist follows on 5 October.
Because the sponsorship ended, but in two separate steps. Scotiabank had been lead sponsor since 2005. After protests at the 2023 ceremony and an open letter in July 2024 in which 43 writers, including two former winners, told their publishers not to submit their books, the bank’s name was taken off the prize on 4 September 2024 — while Scotiabank was still paying for it. The two parted company five months later, on 3 February 2025. The prize is now simply the Giller Prize and has no naming sponsor.
Mostly the Hilary and Galen Weston Foundation, which announced a four million dollar multi-year gift on 10 August 2026, on top of an earlier million. Other named supporters include Power Corporation, Mantella Corporation and Margaret Atwood, who won the prize herself in 1996. The 2025 gala was paid for by anonymous donors, and the foundation has said publicly that it is still looking for sponsors.
100,000 Canadian dollars for the winner and 10,000 for each of the other finalists. That has been the level since 2014; before that it was 50,000, and at the start in 1994 it was 25,000. When a translated book wins, 70,000 goes to the author and 30,000 to the translator. The purse did not drop when Scotiabank left.
For 2026, nine independent booksellers from seven shops across eight provinces and territories — no authors and no critics, which has never happened before in the prize’s history. Earlier juries were made up of writers and critics and usually included one or two from outside Canada; two international jurors resigned during the 2024 controversy and the juries since have been entirely Canadian.
The author has to be a Canadian citizen or a permanent resident of Canada, and the book has to be published in Canada in English within the eligibility year. Novels, short story collections and graphic novels all qualify, and so do translations. Poetry, young adult books, self-published books, posthumous submissions and anything containing AI-generated text do not. Publishers submit, usually one title each, and previous winners are allowed to win again.
Four writers. M. G. Vassanji won the first one in 1994 and again in 2003, Alice Munro in 1998 and 2004, Esi Edugyan in 2011 and 2018, and Souvankham Thammavongsa in 2020 and 2025. Nobody has won it three times.
More easily than you would think. Every winner from 2015 to 2025 has a British edition, mostly from Bloomsbury, Granta, Serpent’s Tail, Dialogue and Picador, and that includes the ones published in Canada by very small presses. The catch is timing: the British edition often arrives one to three years after the Canadian one, so the book that wins in November is frequently not on sale in Europe until the year after.
Facts last checked 15 September 2026. Every British edition named above was checked against that publisher or a British bookshop rather than assumed from the Canadian one. Three caveats. I verified that a British edition exists, not that every one of them is in print today — Bellevue Square is the doubtful one, and the page says so. I did not check British editions before 2015, so the page makes no claim about 2000 to 2014. And the prize’s own About page still carries the old Scotiabank name, which is out of date rather than a correction to anything here.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and I have not read all twenty-seven.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“Nine booksellers, no critics, and a hundred and forty books.”
— The 2026 jury, and a decision no other prize has made.
Eleven winners is a winter of reading and most of them are short. The newsletter goes out once a month with rather less than that, and only what is worth the time.
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