The richest prize in Canadian fiction is about to enrich the writing life of one of five novelists named to the 2024 Giller Award shortlist, with the winner announced at a gala event on Nov. 18.

Former Toronto poet laureate Anne Michaels, who published her award-winning debut novel Fugitive Pieces in 1996, is nominated for Held, her evocative story about the ghosts of war. The jury called it “a novel that floats, a beguiling association of memories, projections, and haunted instances through which the very notion of our mortality …  is interrogated.”

Montreal author Éric Chacour is nominated for the English translation of his award-winning debut novel, What I Know About You. It is also in the running for the $60,000 Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, which will be announced the day after the Giller, setting the Quebec writer up for a potential windfall from his “quiet, touching story” about forbidden love between two men that begins in Cairo and ends in Montreal. 

The other shortlisted novels are Prairie Edge by Conor Kerr, a thriller that follows two Métis cousins who set a herd of bison loose in downtown Edmonton and is also on the Atwood Gibson shortlist; Curiosities by Victoria, B.C.-based writer Anne Fleming, about an amateur historian who researches five overlapping memoirs; and Toronto writer Deepa Rajagopalan’s Peacocks of Instagram, a collection of snapshot-like stories about women of the Indian diaspora.

The jury, writers Noah Richler and Kevin Chong and singer-songwriter Molly Johnson, chose the shortlist from more than 100 submissions. The Giller Prize ceremony will be broadcast on CBC TV, CBC Gem and CBC Radio on Nov. 18.