Canada's Biggest Fiction Award Doubles the Prize Money to be Awarded

Posted on September 18, 2014

Corporate sponsors have been a part of literary prizes for quite a while. It's a safe, usually non-controversial cause for a corporation to support and helps with the sponsor's reputation. And there is no question that the prize money is much bigger when there is a major corporate sponsor.

Canada's biggest literary prize is sponsored by Scotiabank, and the award just got even bigger. Founder Jack Rabinovitch announced today that the Scotiabank Giller Prize will award a whopping C$100,000 to the winner, and C$10,000 to each of the four finalists. That's double the amount of last year's prize money.

Rabinovitch created the prize 21 years ago to help recognize Canadian fiction authors. He named it after his late wife Doris, a literary journalist. The prize money was $25,000, and Canadian booksellers helped foot the bill. Nine years ago, he landed Scotiabank as a sponsor. The bank's board of directors must be pretty happy because they keep upping the prize money.

Rabinovitz noted that authors Mordecai Richler, David Staines and Alice Munro helped him get the prize off the ground more than two decades ago. He thanked Scotiabank for sticking with them over the years and for upping the prize money saying, "Canadian storytellers deserve this recognition. I can hardly imagine what Doris would say." We're sure she would be very proud.

The jury panel for this year's panel consists of National Book Award.finalist Francine Prose, Whitbread Novel Award-winning British novelist Justin Cartwright and Canadian author Shauna Singh Baldwin, winner of the 2000 Commonwealth Prize for Best Book. The shortlist will be announced next month, on October 6, 2014. The gala and awards ceremony will be held on November 10, 2014, and will be broadcast live on CBC in Canada. The prize is highly coveted. Sales of prize winning titles usually spike around 500%.

You can see this year's longlist here.