What You Need to Know About the 2026 Giller Prize Contenders

Giller host Rick Mercer. | Ryan Emberley Photography

Shortlisted

What You Need to Know About the 2026 Giller Prize Contenders

Forget the sophomore slump, as the nominees include four second novels – and one urgent debut

Published October 5, 2026

Fall is all booked up. With its 33rd shortlist just announced, the Giller Prize jury has given the country five new novels to obsess over until the winner is announced on Nov. 16, at the annual CBC-televised gala, with returning host Rick Mercer. There are no previous Giller winners or even shortlisted nominees on the 2026 list. A top contender has to be Sixties Scoop survivor and Indigenous rights lawyer turned author Michelle Good, 69, whose first novel Five Little Indians was named to the Giller Longlist in 2020 and went on to win the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, the Kobo Emerging Writer’s Prize, and CBC’s Canada Reads. This time out, the Maple Creek, Sask., writer’s highly regarded second novel, Eliza Sunshine – about three generations of Cree women – has landed on the shortlist, with the jury calling it “a masterful, deeply personal snapshot of a tragic chapter of Canadian history, navigating readers with unflinching honesty through a story of hope and strength.”

Saskatchewan author Michelle Good is one of the five 2026 Giller Prize longlisted authors, for her novel *Eliza Sunshine*. | Silken Selinger

The only debut this year comes from Patmeena Sabit, an Afghan-American writer living in Toronto, whose Good People – about an immigrant Muslim family in northern Virginia who are either the perpetrators or victims of fatal crime/accident – has been praised worldwide. The New Yorker named it one of the best books of the year so far (in September), saying that the novel “borrows freely from the language of cinema and television and even social media” making it “feel urgent.”

From left: Elana Rabinovitch, executive director of the Giller Prize and the Giller Foundation, at last year’s Gala Awards; the foundation for the late philanthropists Hilary and Galen Weston (seen here in 1998) is the new sponsor of the Giller. | Ryan Emberley Photography; Steve Russell/Toronto Star via Getty Images

Rounding out the list are three quietly powerful sophomore works whose authors are spread across the country. Regina’s Tara Gereaux is nominated for Wild People Quiet, a story of a Métis woman’s experience of passing for white in 1940s Saskatchewan. The Small Ones is a novel about child soldiers in the Iran-Iraq war, written by Nazanine Hozar, who was born in Tehran, grew up in Surrey, B.C., and now teaches creative writing at Simon Fraser University. On the east coast, Nicholas Herring works as a fisherman and a carpenter in Murray Harbour, P.E.I., while also publishing award-winning novels – his first, Some Hellish (2022), won the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. And his new Giller-nominated book, Your Breath in Charcoal, is a road-trip novel that the jury calls “an uproariously Maritime tale.”

The authors will now get a feel for the Giller effect, which, on average, increases book sales by about 400 per cent, and the winner will take home $100,000 from the Prize’s new sponsor, The Hilary and Galen Weston Foundation. For the writers mentioned above, many of whom are only two books in, a nomination and especially a win can be career-making.

Here, we look back on what Zoomer’s Novel Encounters columnist Nathalie Atkinson has written about three of the nominated titles.