Mona Awad, Eddy Boudel Tan, Emma Donoghue, Emma Knight and Souvankham Thammavongsa are the five writers shortlisted for the 2025 Giller Prize.
The $100,000 award annually recognizes the best in Canadian fiction.
The 2025 shortlist features five novels, covering a wide range of material, from an 1800s train disaster in Donoghue’s The Paris Express, to the family tragedy revealed in Tan’s The Tiger and the Cosmonaut to life working in a nail salon in Thammavongsa’s Pick A Colour.
Thammavongsa previously won the 2020 Giller Prize for her short story collection How To Pronounce Knife, while Donoghue was on the shortlist in 2016 for The Wonder and on the longlist for two other novels.
Awad, nominated this year for We Love You, Bunny, also made the 2016 shortlist for 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl.
Knight is the only author on the 2025 shortlist honoured for a debut work of fiction, the novel The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus.
The books on the 2025 Giller Prize shortlist are available in accessible formats through the National Network for Equitable Library Services and the Centre for Equitable Library Access.
The shortlist was chosen from more than 100 books by jury chair and former finalist Dionne Irving along with jurors Loghan Paylor and Deepa Rajagopalan.
The 2025 Giller Prize award ceremony, hosted by comedian Rick Mercer, will be broadcast on Monday, Nov. 17, at 9 p.m. ET (11:30 p.m. AT, 12 a.m. NT) on CBC TV and CBC Gem, with a livestream also available at 9 p.m. ET on CBC’s YouTube channel.
It will also be broadcast on CBC Radio One and CBC Listen.
In 2023, the Giller Prize broadcast was twice interrupted by protesters taking issue with Scotiabank, the prize’s former main sponsor, because of the bank’s investment in Elbit Systems, an Israeli defence contractor.
In 2024, an organization named CanLit Responds gathered signatures of Canadian writers calling for the Giller Prize to divest from Scotiabank, as well as two other sponsors, and pledged to not submit their work or attend any related events until their demands are met.
Earlier this year, the Giller Prize parted ways with Scotiabank as a sponsor.
Last year’s Giller Prize winner was Anne Michaels for her novel Held.
Sarah Bernstein, who won the award in 2023 for Study for Obedience, signed the July 2024 letter calling for the prize to cut ties with Scotiabank. Omar El Akkad, who won the prize in 2021, also signed it.
Other past Giller Prize winners include Suzette Mayr for The Sleeping Car Porter, Esi Edugyan for Washington Black, Michael Redhill for Bellevue Square, Margaret Atwood for Alias Grace, Mordecai Richler for Barney’s Version, Alice Munro for Runaway, and Madeleine Thien for Do Not Say We Have Nothing.
Toronto businessman Jack Rabinovitch founded the prize in honour of his late wife, literary journalist Doris Giller, in 1994. Rabinovitch died in 2017 at the age of 87.
You can learn more about the five shortlisted books below.
We Love You, Bunny by Mona Awad
A sequel and prequel to Bunny, Mona Awad’s debut novel, We Love You, Bunny takes readers back to the New England town and creative writing MFA that started it all. A few years after graduation, Sam publishes her book about the violent and surreal experiences with the other cliquey girls in her program.
On her book tour, she stops at her alma mater and is kidnapped by her frenemies, who are upset with the way she portrayed them in her book. With Sam tied up in the fateful attic, the bunnies go back in time, recounting the story as they remember it.
“We Love You, Bunny is an unhinged waltz through the corridors of creative academia, blending satire and surreal magical chaos as artistic creations stumble through the night with axes and fall in love, frat parties end in murder, and creative jealousies fuel uncanny powers,” wrote the jury in a press statement.
“As hilarious as it is inventive, Awad’s novel is refreshingly original, bold in imagination and daring in its execution, asking us to consider: what do we owe to art, and what, if anything, does art owe us in return?”
Awad is a Boston-based author whose debut short story collection, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, won the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, the Colorado Book Award and was shortlisted for the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize. She is also the author of the novels Bunny, Rouge and All’s Well. Awad teaches at Syracuse University.
The Tiger and the Cosmonaut by Eddy Boudel Tan
Having built a new life in Vancouver with his boyfriend, Casper Han rarely returns to his hometown, a small remote town in B.C. But when a crisis forces him and his siblings to reunite, they are compelled to confront a long-avoided tragedy — the mysterious disappearance of his twin brother more than 20 years ago. In The Tiger and the Cosmonaut, the siblings try to solve what happened to Sam in order to move forward.
“While ruminating on the ways in which the kinetic forces of loss can ricochet through a family, this novel ponders what we owe our families of origin and the sometimes contradictory narratives we tell about ourselves, constructions that both hold us together and push us apart,” said the jury.
“A deeply introspective novel told as an unfolding mystery, this book blurs our vision in relation to the complicated nature of truth while also showing us how stories keep us sane.”
Tan is a writer based in Vancouver, where he co-founded the Sidewalk Supper Project. His previous works include the novels After Elias and The Rebellious Tide.
Tan has been a finalist for the Edmund White Award, the ReLit Best Novel Award and the Ferro-Grumley Award and was named a Rising Star by Writers’ Trust of Canada in 2021. His work has appeared in Joyland and Yolk.
North by Northwest15:37Eddy Boudel Tan on The Tiger and the Cosmonaut
The Paris Express by Emma Donoghue
The Paris Express takes readers aboard a suspenseful train journey from the Normandy coast to Paris. Inspired by a real-life photo of a train hanging off the side of Montparnasse station, The Paris Express unravels over the course of one fateful day, featuring the fascinating stories of the passengers, from a young boy traveling solo to a pregnant woman on the run, the devoted railway workers and a young anarchist on a mission.
“As intricately crafted as a station master’s pocket watch, The Paris Express gains momentum and depth with each chapter, propelling us towards an inevitable, and deeply moving, conclusion,” said the jury. “Donoghue’s novel unearths the smallest fears and deepest desires hidden inside ourselves and our fellow travellers, and shows us who we can become when faced with certain catastrophe.”
Donoghue is an Irish Canadian writer whose books include the novels Landing, Room, Frog Music, The Wonder, The Pull of the Stars, Learned by Heart and the children’s book The Lotterys Plus One. Room was an international bestseller and was adapted into a critically acclaimed film starring Brie Larson.
The Pull of the Stars was longlisted for the 2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize and Canada Reads 2025 and shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award.
The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus by Emma Knight
In The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus, Pen is set for an eventful first-year university experience at the University of Edinburgh. In addition to her studies, she 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 family estate, she can’t help but become enthralled with his entire family — and slowly begins to unravel the family secrets that left her parents so pained.
“With charm, insight, and emotional precision, Knight deftly weaves themes of intergenerational legacy and self-discovery into a narrative both intimate and resonant,” said the jury.
Knight is an author, journalist and entrepreneur based in Toronto. Her work has appeared in Literary Hub, Vogue, The Globe and Mail, The Walrus and The New York Times. She co-hosted and created the podcast Fanfare and co-founded the organic beverage company Greenhouse. She is the author of cookbooks How to Eat with One Hand and The Greenhouse Cookbook. The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus was chosen for Jenna Bush Hager’s book club as well as that of Barnes & Noble.
Pick a Colour by Souvankham Thammavongsa
Pick A Colour tells the story of the day in the life of Ning, a retired boxer who works at a nail salon. Ning paints and polishes customers’ nails, falling into the routine and rhythms. But despite her anonymous exterior, she’s an intellectual, a deep thinker and is haunted by the roads not taken.
“With an inimitable style that decentralizes the English language, crackling wit, and profound confidence, author Thammavongsa challenges our biases and insists that we never look at a nail salon, or its workers, the same way again,” said the jury. “A master of form and restraint, Thammavongsa once again affirms her place as one of the most vital literary voices of our time.”
Thammavongsa wrote the short story collection How to Pronounce Knife, which won the Giller Prize and the Trillium Book Award. She’s also the author of four poetry collections and stand-alone stories that have been featured in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The Paris Review, The Atlantic and Granta. She was born in a refugee camp in Thailand and raised in Toronto.
If you’re interested in writing fiction, the 2026 CBC Short Story Prize will be accepting submissions between Sept. 1 and Nov. 1. You can submit your original, unpublished short fiction for a chance to win $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, a two-week writing residency at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and have your story published on CBC Books.
