TORONTO, Jan. 24, 2022 /CNW/ - Elana Rabinovitch, Executive Director of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, today announced the five-member jury panel for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize. This year marks the 29^th anniversary of The Prize.    

The 2022 jury members are:

Award winning Canadian authors Kaie Kellough, Casey Plett and Waubgeshig Rice and American authors Katie Kitamura and Scott Spencer.

Some background on the 2022 jury:

Kaie Kellough is a novelist, poet, and sound performer. His work emerges at a crossroads of social engagement and formal experiment. From Western Canada, he lives in Montréal and has roots in Guyana, South America. His books include Dominoes at the Crossroads (short fiction, Véhicule 2020), Magnetic Equator (poetry, McClelland and Stewart 2019), and Accordéon (novel, ARP 2016).  He has been awarded the Griffin Poetry Prize and the QWF Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction. His work has been longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and nominated for several other national awards. Kaie's vocal performance, recorded audio, and electronic narrative explore migration and futurity. He creates mixed media compositions with saxophonist and synthesist Jason Sharp. Their collaborative audio-visual performances have been filmed and broadcast by jazz festivals in Europe and Canada. Kaie has written plays for television and librettos for large musical ensembles. His solo and group sound performances have toured internationally.

Katie Kitamura's most recent novel is Intimacies. One of The New York Times 10 Best Books of 2021 and a Barack Obama recommended read, it was longlisted for the National Book Award and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. Her third novel, A Separation, was a finalist for the Premio von Rezzori and a New York Times Notable Book. She is also the author of Gone To The Forest and The Longshot, both finalists for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award. Her work has been translated into nineteen languages and is being adapted for film and television. A recipient of fellowships from the Lannan, Santa Maddalena, and Jan Michalski foundations, Katie has written for publications including The New York Times Book Review, The New York Times, The Guardian, Granta, BOMB, Triple Canopy, and Frieze. She teaches in the creative writing program at New York University.

Casey Plett is the author of A Dream of a Woman, Little Fish, A Safe Girl to Love, and the co-editor of Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy From Transgender Writers. She has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Globe and Mail, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, the Winnipeg Free Press, and other publications. A winner of the Amazon First Novel Award, the Firecracker Award for Fiction, and a two-time winner of the Lambda Literary Award, her work has also been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. She splits her time between New York City and Windsor, Ontario.

Waubgeshig Rice is an author and journalist from Wasauksing First Nation. He has written three fiction titles, and his short stories and essays have been published in numerous anthologies. His most recent novel, Moon of the Crusted Snow, was published in 2018 and became a national bestseller. He graduated from the journalism program at the university formerly known as Ryerson in 2002 and spent most of his journalism career with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) as a video journalist and radio host. He left CBC in 2020 to focus on his literary career. He lives in Sudbury, Ontario with his wife and two sons.

Scott Spencer is the author of twelve novels, including Endless Love, Waking the Dead, A Ship Made of Paper, and Man in the Woods. He has been nominated for the National Book Award three times and has taught at Columbia University, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Williams College, the University of Virginia, and at Eastern Correctional Facility as part of the Bard Prison Initiative. He lives with writer Jo Ann Beard in upstate New York.

Images of the 2022 jurors are available at scotiabankgillerprize.ca/media-resources.

Audible.ca will provide each jury member with a complimentary one-year membership to listen to available submissions, as well as titles by other Canadian writers. For all listeners, Audible.ca has a dedicated Scotiabank Giller Prize page for easy discovery of some of Canada's most exciting literary voices.

The longlist will be presented at events in St. John's, Newfoundland in early September, with the shortlist announced later in the month in Toronto, pending Public Health directives related to COVID-19. The winner will be named at a nationally televised black-tie dinner and awards ceremony in Toronto in November.

Submissions are now being accepted. The 2022 submission package, including updated details, can be found at scotiabankgillerprize.ca/about/submissions/. The first submission deadline for books published between October 1, 2021, and February 28, 2022, are to be received by February 18, 2022.

About the Prize
The Giller Prize, founded by Jack Rabinovitch in 1994, highlights the very best in Canadian fiction year after year. In 2005, the prize teamed up with Scotiabank who increased the winnings four-fold. The Scotiabank Giller Prize now awards $100,000 annually to the author of the best Canadian novel or short story collection published in English, and $10,000 to each of the finalists. The award is named in honour of the late literary journalist Doris Giller by her husband Toronto businessman Jack Rabinovitch, who passed away in August 2017.

About Scotiabank
Scotiabank is a leading bank in the Americas. Guided by our purpose: "for every future", we help our customers, their families and their communities achieve success through a broad range of advice, products, and services, including personal and commercial banking, wealth management and private banking, corporate and investment banking, and capital markets. With a team of approximately 90,000 employees and assets of approximately $1.2 trillion (as of October 31, 2021), Scotiabank trades on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: BNS) and New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: BNS). For more information, please visit http://www.scotiabank.com and follow us on Twitter @ScotiabankViews.

About Audible, Inc.
Audible, a leading producer and provider of original spoken-word entertainment and audiobooks, is committed to supporting talented Canadian authors and creators and is proud to be the exclusive audiobook sponsor of the Scotiabank Giller Prize. At Audible.ca, an Amazon.com, Inc. subsidiary (NASDAQ: AMZN), we believe storytelling and the spoken word have the power to help people rediscover the joy in listening, making us more informed, more connected, and more human. Audible content includes hundreds of thousands of audiobooks, podcasts, guided wellness programs, theatrical performances, A-list comedy, and exclusive Audible Originals you won't find anywhere else.

SOURCE Scotiabank