Johanna Skibsrud has won the $50,000 Scotiabank Giller Prize awards for her novel, The Sentimentalists. It was a big win for her indie publisher, Gaspereau Press.
The annual prize goes to the best English-language Canadian novel or short story collection. The finalists each take home $5,000. The complete list of five finalists follows after the jump.
Here’s more from the prize site: “The Sentimentalists charts the painful search by a dutiful daughter to learn – and more importantly, to learn to understand – the multi-layered truth which lies at the moral core of her dying father’s life. Something happened to Napoleon Haskell during his tour of duty in Vietnam that changed his life and haunted the rest of his days. At the behest of his daughters, he moves from a trailer in North Dakota to a small lakeside town in Ontario where his family can only watch as his past slips away in a descending fog of senility. The writing here is trip-wire taut as the exploration of guilt, family and duty unfolds.”
• David Bergen for his novel The Matter with Morris, published by Phyllis Bruce Books/HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
• Alexander MacLeod for his short story collection Light Lifting, published by Biblioasis
• Sarah Selecky for her short story collection This Cake is for the Party, published by Thomas Allen Publishers
• Johanna Skibsrud for her novel The Sentimentalists, published by Gaspereau Press
• Kathleen Winter for her novel Annabel, published by House of Anansi Press