Five Canadian writers have made the shortlist for the 2024 Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.
The annual $60,000 award recognizes the best novel or short story collection by a Canadian author.
The nominees are Éric Chacour for What I Know About You, translated by Pablo Strauss, Conor Kerr for Prairie Edge, Canisia Lubrin for Code Noir, Fawn Parker for Hi, It’s Me and Sheung-King for Batshit Seven.
“Through the minds and incandescent talent of their creators, works of fiction have the power to get us closer to understanding truths about the human experience,” said David Leonard, executive director of Writers’ Trust of Canada, in a press statement.
“These five works are compelling additions to our canon and will long be considered by future readers looking to study the craft of writing.”
This year’s jury is composed of celebrated Canadian fiction writers Saeed Teebi, Joan Thomas and Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike.
The shortlisted writers were selected by the jury from 139 titles. Each finalist will receive $5,000.
The books are available in accessible formats through the Centre for Equitable Library Access.
The 2024 winner will be announced on Nov. 19 at the annual Writers’ Trust Awards ceremony at CBC’s Glenn Gould Studio in Toronto.
The Writers’ Trust of Canada has awarded an annual fiction prize since 1997, and it was renamed in honour of Margaret Atwood and Graeme Gibson in 2021.
Atwood and Gibson were among the five co-founders of the Writers’ Trust of Canada, alongside fellow writers Pierre Berton, Margaret Laurence and David Young.
Neither Atwood nor Gibson were ever nominated for the prize that now bears their name.
The Writers’ Trust of Canada is an organization that supports Canadian writers through literary awards, fellowships, financial grants, mentorships and more.
It gives out 11 prizes in recognition of the year’s best in fiction, nonfiction and short story, as well as mid-career and lifetime achievement awards.
Last year’s winner of the Atwood Gibson Prize was Kai Thomas for his novel In The Upper Country.
Other past winners include katherena vermette, Austin Clarke, Alice Munro, Lawrence Hill, Miriam Toews, André Alexis and David Chariandy.
Get to know the 2024 finalists and their books below.
In What I Know About You, Tarek is on the right path: he’ll be a doctor like his father, marry and have children. But when he falls for his patient’s son, Ali, his life is turned upside-down as he realizes his sexuality against a backdrop of political turmoil in 1960s Cairo. In the 2000s, Tarek is now a doctor in Montreal. When someone begins to write to him and about him, the past that he’s been trying to forget comes back to haunt him.
“At a moment, there is this incompatibility between the tradition and what he feels inside,” said Chacour in an interview on Bookends with Mattea Roach.
“So what was not a pressure at first becomes a pressure and becomes impossible to avoid. So he has to make a decision, quite radical, and flee away to Montreal.”
There is this incompatibility between the tradition and what he feels inside.– Éric Chacour
What I Know About You is also on the shortlist for the 2024 Giller Prize.
Chacour is a Montreal-based writer who was born to Egyptian parents and grew up between France and Quebec. In addition to writing, he works in the financial sector. What I Know About You is his first book and was a bestseller in its French edition, winning many awards including the Prix Femina.
Strauss has translated 12 works of fiction, several graphic novels and one screenplay. He was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for translation for The Country Will Bring Us No Peace, Synapses and The Longest Year. His translation of Le plongeur by Stephane Larue called The Dishwasher won the 2020 Amazon First Novel Award. He lives in Quebec City.
From the book:
You had no sense when life would begin in earnest. As a child you were a brilliant student. Everyone said your good grades would serve you well later in life. So life would start later, it seemed. Of the succession of moments that made up your life to that point, few traces remain. Lost are the names of those who wore out their backs carrying you around on their shoulders, unnoticed the hours that went into cooking your favourite dish. What you remember are the minor details: how you laughed at Nesrine because she couldn’t pronounce the Arabic word for pyramid; how you ate frescas on the beach, molasses from the round wafers staining your bathing suits; how you drew pictures with your fingers on the windows that fogged up when Fatheya, your family servant, cooked.
Jury citation: “Chacour is a master of perspective and careful revelation. This story overflows with crushing beauty as it grips readers in its world.”
Bookends with Mattea Roach34:28Eric Chacour: Exploring the power of familial expectations and forbidden love
When Montreal author Eric Chacour wrote his first book, he didn’t expect it to become a huge hit in France. Translated from French to English by Pablo Strauss, What I Know About You is a novel set in Cairo and Montreal, exploring sexuality as well as family secrets and pressures. It’s nominated for this year’s Giller Prize and Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Eric and Mattea Roach discuss the inspiration behind his debut novel.
In Prairie Edge, Isidore “Ezzy” Desjarlais and Grey Ginther live together in Grey’s uncle’s trailer, passing their time with cribbage and cheap beer. Grey is cynical of what she feels is a lazy and performative activist culture, while Ezzy is simply devoted to his distant cousin. So when Grey concocts a scheme to set a herd of bison loose in downtown Edmonton, Ezzy is along for the ride — one that has devastating, fatal consequences.
“When you have bison return to a landscape, especially in urban space like Edmonton, there’s a return back to an Indigenous governance structure and a lifestyle in a society that we necessarily haven’t seen yet,” said Kerr in an interview on The Next Chapter.
“For Grey, this is actual LandBack in action by the restoration of bison in the spaces that they would have historically always been in.”
This is actual LandBack in action by the restoration of bison in the spaces that they would have historically always been in.– Conor Kerr
Prairie Edge is also on the shortlist for the 2024 Giller Prize.
Conor Kerr is a Métis/Ukrainian writer who hails from many prairie towns and cities, including Saskatoon. He now lives in Edmonton. A 2022 CBC Books writer to watch, his previous works include the novels Old Gods and Avenue of Champions, which was longlisted for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize, and won the ReLit award the same year. Kerr currently teaches creative writing at the University of Alberta.
From the book:
Around two in the morning, Grey dropped me off at an outskirt suburb of Edmonton. The kind where there were no numbers to tell you where you were on the grid, just the name of a landscape feature like Rolling Meadows, followed by a Blvd., Way, Point, Lane. I assumed that rich people loved not having numbers in their addresses. Why else would you live out here? Grey took off down the block in her beat-up Honda Cr-v. I watched the taillights until they disappeared around a suburb bend. Rich people also loved curves in the road.
Jury citation: “Kerr’s main characters are achingly real. Prairie Edge is eloquent, humane, and far-seeing. An essential Canadian story.”
The Next Chapter18:53Bison roam Downtown Edmonton in Prairie Edge
Métis-Ukrainian author Conor Kerr’s latest novel takes inspiration from a real-life news story. In Prairie Edge, two distant Métis cousins release bison into Edmonton’s urban green spaces in an act of reclamation.
The Code Noir, or the Black Code, was a set of 59 articles decreed by Louis XVI in 1685 which regulated ownership of slaves in all French colonies. In her debut fiction work Code Noir, Canisia Lubrin reflects on these codes to examine the legacy of enslavement and colonization — and the inherent power of Black resistance.
“Forms of resistance happen in small ways and in large ways,” said Lubrin in an interview on The Next Chapter. “I wanted for this book to engage the smallness that is happening in parallel to the large scale forms of liberation that we often know — the protest and the organizing that puts systemic pressure on the ways of the world. That leads to something like the abolition of slavery, for instance.”
I wanted for this book to engage the smallness that is happening in parallel to the large scale forms of liberation that we often know.– Canisia Lubrin
Code Noir is also a finalist for the 2024 Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction.
Lubrin is a Canadian writer, editor and academic who was born in St. Lucia and currently based in Whitby, Ont. Her debut poetry collection Voodoo Hypothesis was longlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award, the Pat Lowther Award and was a finalist for the Raymond Souster Award. Her poetry collection The Dyzgraphxst won the 2021 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. It also won the 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the 2020 Governor General’s Literary Prize for poetry.
From the book:
Ole Moon rode into town on his brown horse, towing a beige carriage. A calamitous trail of dust hovered when he stopped in front of the Great House, which was next to the tavern. He asked where he could find one Helena Jallaim. He said it like this, with his “one” alveolar, beginning with gw: “Anybuddy know gwhere I might find gwone Helena Jallaim?”
Jury citation: “Code Noir expands what is possible in the realm of narrative. Lubrin’s work is conceptual genius, allusive across a wide swath of culture, from jazz to literature to art.”
The Next Chapter16:17Acclaimed Canadian poet and writer Canisia Lubrin feels at home making her fiction debut
Canisia Lubrin is an award-winning Canadian poet, critic and academic. She first gained acclaim for her works of poetry, but always knew she would eventually enter the world of fiction writing. Her experimental novel debut is titled Code Noir — a series of connected stories that range in style and tone to reflect on postcolonial agency and autonomy.
In Hi, It’s Me, Fawn returns to her mother’s farmhouse after her death — one that is also inhabited by four other women with interesting and strange beliefs. As she lives in her mother’s room and tries to figure out what to do with her possessions, she becomes obsessed with archiving her mother’s writing and documents, teaching her more and more about the woman she thought she knew so well.
“I do think [the healing process] is over in the sense that when I finished the book, it felt finished,” said Parker in an interview on Bookends . “And now I don’t spend every day thinking about my mom. She’ll never not be the mother that I lost. But I do think there was a bit of a closing feeling and I have the book to thank for that.”
There was a bit of a closing feeling and I have the book to thank for that.– Fawn Parker
Fawn Parker is an author and current PhD student at the University of New Brunswick. Her novel What We Both Know was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2022. Her poetry collection Soft Inheritance won the Fiddlehead Poetry Book Prize.
From the book:
She is my first dead person, my mother. There is luck in that, if you ask anyone. I am twenty-nine. To live twenty-nine years and to not know death is a very lucky thing.
Plus it is a normal thing to lose a mother.
But losing my mother doesn’t feel how I imagine other lost mothers must feel, to those who lost them. I consume myself with the subject as if I have discovered something new. She’s not just dead, I want to tell them (them? who?), she’s gone. I am surrounded by mocking evidence of her inhabitancy of this room. Quickly, it is expiring. Today she was alive. When the day runs out that will no longer be true. Tomorrow I will be able to say that yesterday she was alive, at least. The next day, nothing. She will just be dead. The fact seems to be at its smallest now, growing with time. For now she is many things, and there are many places left to find her.
Eventually she will be nowhere at all and nothing but dead.
Jury citation: “In prose that unfurls teasingly, Parker portrays friendship, beauty, eating disorder, sexuality, morbidity, and grief with measured humour.”
Bookends with Mattea Roach24:35Fawn Parker: Blending her own grief with fiction in new novel Hi, It’s Me
Fawn Parker’s latest book centres on a woman navigating life immediately following the death of her mother. The novel is a finalist for this year’s Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Fawn and Mattea Roach talk about grief, loss and the real-life inspiration behind Hi, It’s Me.
Glen “Glue” Wu has a general apathy toward his return to Hong Kong in Batshit Seven. As a lacklustre, weed smoking, hungover ESL teacher, Glue watches passively as Hong Kong falls into conflict around him. He cares only for his sister, trying to marry rich, an on-and-off-again relationship and the memory of a Canadian connection now lost. Government control hardens, thrusting Glue into a journey that ultimately ends in violence.
“Glue feels like there’s a sense of amnesia, collective amnesia that that that he feels in in Hong Kong would because it’s so focused on finance and and everyday life is very kind of corporate,” said Sheung-King in an interview on The Next Chapter. “He doesn’t have access to any art scene or communities. He lives in the suburbs alone in an island in his childhood home and all of this is the doing of the larger governments that were in charge of Hong Kong.”
“And and Glue is aware that Hong Kong was designed to be to be a place like this. Why he longs for Canada is not only because of somebody he misses, but also back then he was more intellectually engaged.”
Why he longs for Canada is not only because of somebody he misses, but also back then he was more intellectually engaged.– Sheung-King
Sheung-King’s first novel, You Are Eating an Orange. You are Naked., was a finalist for multiple awards, including the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and the Amazon Canada First Novel Award. It was also longlisted for Canada Reads 2021. Sheung-Kin splits his time between Canada and China.
From the book:
SHATTERED GLASS is vibrating noiselessly inside Glue’s head. He is hungover. The air-conditioned room dried all his sweat from last night, leaving a layer of sandy grease atop his skin. Glue looks up at the ceiling. It is perfectly white. Glue tries not to blink, stares so hard that he becomes lost in this ocean of whiteness. Yet when he shuts his eyes, the broken glass inside of his head reverberates, making him nauseated. The noiseless shaking of glass, an emblem of entropy, forms in his mind, a dark sea consisting of a thousand waves and no earth.
Jury citation: “Sheung-King deftly conveys the dilemma of the self-aware citizen. A perfect amalgam of form and idea, Batshit Seven is poignant, darkly hilarious, and stunningly original.”
The Next Chapter15:21From foul language to QR codes, Sheung-King’s latest novel is an unexpected ode to modern life in Hong Kong
Sheung-King is the pen name of author Aaron Tang. His latest book follows a millennial living in Hong Kong, as he struggles to make sense of his identity and beliefs.
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