The 2025 Giller Prize shortlist has been announced
And the awards gala will once again be pre-taped
The 2025 Giller Prize shortlist was revealed today, with five authors vying for the award and its $100,000 in prize money. The Giller recognizes excellence in Canadian fiction.
The authors selected by the Giller’s jury are Mona Awad, for We Love You, Bunny; Eddy Boudel Tan, for The Tiger and the Cosmonaut; Emma Donoghue, for The Paris Express; Emma Knight, for The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus; and Souvankham Thammavongsa, for Pick a Colour.
Thammavongsa won the Giller in 2020 for How to Pronounce Knife, a collection of short stories. Donoghue made the shortlist in 2016 for The Wonder, as did Awad for 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl.
The CBC confirmed with Toronto Life that this year’s awards gala will be pre-taped, with the broadcast airing later in the same evening.
In 2023, protesters forced a pause of the live awards ceremony after disrupting the stage and holding a sign that read, “Scotiabank Funds Genocide.” The sign referred to the bank’s $500-million investment in Israeli defence contractor Elbit Systems while being the Giller’s lead sponsor.
The following year saw the Giller mired in controversy. An advocacy group called CanLit Responds called for the prize to fully divest from Scotiabank, with past winners Sarah Bernstein and Omar El Akkad pledging, alongside nearly 50 other authors, not to submit their work for consideration until the Giller complied.
Related: Thirty years, 30 photos—A look back at the Scotiabank Giller Prize’s greatest moments
Earlier this year, the Giller organization announced that it had parted ways with Scotiabank.
This year’s winner will be announced at the gala in November, which will once again be hosted by Rick Mercer.
Carly Lewis is a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Wired, Interview Magazine, Pitchfork, Elle, and Maclean’s, where she is a contributing editor. Her work has been recognized by the National Magazine Awards and the Digital Publishing Awards. She reports on city life, culture—including what people do online—politics, art and crime. She received the Dave Greber Freelance Writers Award for “The Murder of Ashley Wadsworth,” an investigative feature about a Canadian teenager who was killed by a man she met on social media, published by Maclean’s.
