2025 Giller Prize ceremony underway to award $100K to best work of Canadian fiction

2025 Giller appreciate

A followup to Mona Awad's bestselling refreshing bunny girl, We Love You, Bunny is about what happens when the villains of the story are given a say.

The protagonist, Sam, publishes a book about the girls in her creative writing program, a cult-like clique known as the Bunnies.

When Sam returns to her alma mater on a book tour, she's kidnapped by her frenemies, tied up in the attic, and forced to hear the story the way they remember it, in all its magical and bloody glory.

We Love You, Bunny is Awad's fifth book. Her debut, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, was also shortlisted for the Giller Prize in 2016. Awad was born in Montreal and now lives in Boston. She teaches at Syracuse University.

Mona Awad takes the stage to discuss her novel We Love You, Bunny. As she mounts the stairs, she whispers to Mercer that she’s a big fan.

In Emma Knight's The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus, Pen is set for an eventful first-year university experience at the University of Edinburgh.

There, she also looks for answers about her parents' messy divorce by writing a letter to her dad's estranged best friend, thriller writer Lord Lennox.

When he invites her to spend a weekend at his Scottish countryside estate, she can't help but become enthralled with his entire family. Little by little, she slowly begins to unravel the secrets that left her parents so hurt.

Knight is an author, journalist and entrepreneur based in Toronto. She co-founded the organic beverage company Greenhouse and is author of cookbooks How to Eat with One Hand and The Greenhouse Cookbook.

The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus, Knight's first novel, was chosen for both Barnes & Noble and American journalist Jenna Bush Hager's book clubs.

Emma Knight is the first author on the short list to take the stage. She's nominated for her debut novel, The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus.

The broadcast started with Canadian authors Ian Williams, Ann-Marie MacDonald and John Irving affirming "I am an author" and sharing anecdotes about the writing life.

That's a play on the Screen Actors Guild Awards' "I am an actor" opening — the show traditionally opens with actors dishing about what it means to be part of the profession.

Newfoundland and Labrador’s Rick Mercer, a comedian who has won numerous awards for his work in Canadian TV, has returned to host this year’s ceremony, which just got underway.

A small group of protesters stood outside of the ceremony in downtown Toronto during the pre-taping.

Protesters held a larger-than-life puppet of Scotiabank investment manager David Fingold holding a cheque made out to Israel, next to a banner asking whether the bank is still funding the Giller Prize.

Protesters were referencing controversies around Scotiabank’s investments in arms manufacturer Elbit Systems, and the fact that the Giller Prize has not revealed the donors who contributed to this year’s pot of money — leading some to question whether Scotiabank is still involved.

We've mentioned that the Giller Prize cut ties with previous sponsor Scotiabank in February, and that its director said $5 million is needed from the Canadian government to continue beyond 2025.

So where is this year's $100,000 prize money coming from?

No one really knows – and that's caused some controversy.

Rabinovitch, the executive director, said the money is from donors who wish to remain anonymous.

CanLit Responds, a group of writers and artists against arms funding in the literary world, has said this "raises serious concerns of transparency and accountability."

Writers Against the War on Gaza have also called for more transparency. "Writers, readers, and the broader public deserve to know where the prize money is coming from," the group's Toronto chapter wrote in an Instagram post.

Last year's Giller Prize winner was poet and author Anne Michaels for Held.

The Toronto-based writer's decades-spanning novel begins on a First World War battlefield near the River Aisne in 1917, where John lies in the falling snow, unable to move or feel his legs. It jumps in time and place to explore a fragmented picture of war and those who feel its reverberations.

In her acceptance speech, she said that her writing is a way of bearing witness "against war, indifference, against amnesia of every sort."

Before taking home last year's prize, she was shortlisted for the Giller Prize twice: in 1996 for Fugitive Pieces and in 2009 for The Winter Vault. Held was also shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize.

You don't need to be a bibliophile to be familiar with Giller winners; more than a few have found fairly mainstream success.

You may be familiar with 1997 winner Barney's Version by Mordecai Richler. That was turned into the Paul Giamatti-led 2010 film, similarly about an unreliable narrator — who just may have murdered his best friend.

A fan of Oprah? Then you've probably heard of Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance, one of the few Canadian novels to land in her book club.

Or are you more of a theatre-goer? Then you must have heard of Fifteen Dogs; adapted from André Alexis's 2015 winner, the stage production is one of the most critically acclaimed plays to hit Toronto in years.

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