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.
Last year’s Giller Prize winner was Anne Michaels for her novel Held.
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.
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.
You can learn more about the five shortlisted books below.
We Love You, Bunny by Mona Awad
We Love You, Bunny is a novel by Mona Awad. (Scribner Canada, Angela Sterling)
A sequel and prequel to Bunny, one of Mona Awad’s bestselling novels, 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, the Bunnies.
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.
“With these girls, I thought that if I occupy each of their heads, I’ll break open that cult and I’ll show how everyone feels like they’re an outsider,” said Awad on an episode of Bookends with Mattea Roach.
“It’s not an experience that’s specific to one kind of character. We all feel that way in our lives. “
With these girls, I thought that if I occupy each of their heads, I’ll break open that cult and I’ll show how everyone feels like they’re an outsider.– Mona Awad
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 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
The Tiger and the Cosmonaut is a novel by Eddy Boudel Tan. (Penguin Canada, Hannes van der Merwe)
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.
“Instead of writing a story that was explicitly about race and class, I wrote a story about race and class that was disguised as a mystery and I think that served the story really well,” Boudel Tan said in an interview with CBC Books.
I wrote a story about race and class that was disguised as a mystery and I think that served the story really well.– Eddy Boudel Tan
“I wrote this book to honour not my family, but families like mine, families that have migrated to Canada and have had to make sense of this bewildering place and figure out how to build a life here and families who are raising children who they want to integrate and prosper in this land while also honouring their heritage.”
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.
LISTEN | Eddy Boudel Tan on The Tiger and the Cosmonaut:
North by Northwest15:37Eddy Boudel Tan on The Tiger and the Cosmonaut
The Paris Express by Emma Donoghue
The Paris Express is a novel by Emma Donoghue. (HarperCollins Canada, Woodgate Photography)
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.
“I was delighted to seize the chance to write about a disaster of any kind because I love the fact that, when a day goes wrong …. it’s affecting all these different people,” she said in an interview on Bookends with Mattea Roach. “So it’s a wonderful test of character. Would we be the ones helpfully holding the hand of the person beside us or would we be clambering over their heads trying to get our laptops?”
I was delighted to seize the chance to write about a disaster of any kind because I love the fact that, when a day goes wrong …. it’s affecting all these different people.– Emma Donoghue
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 Giller Prize and Canada Reads 2025 and shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award.
The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus by Emma Knight
The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus is a novel by Emma Knight. (Viking, Caitlin Cronenberg)
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 hurt.
“In the case of Pen, she really wants to understand what it was about love that resulted in so much pain for her parents,” said Knight in an interview on Bookends with Mattea Roach.
She wants to understand that gap and know, in her own journey, whether to be optimistic, what to look for.– Emma Knight
“Romance is appealing to her. She doesn’t believe in it, her practical experience is that marriage does not lead to forever companionship and a balm for the soul. She wants to understand that gap and know, in her own journey, whether to be optimistic, what to look for, if love should be a part of that and so on.”
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 is a book by Souvankham Thammavongsa. (Knopf Canada, Steph Martyniuk)
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 content, but haunted by experiences past.
“The way that nail salon workers have been written about, they’ve been seen as in a pitiful frame, that it’s a lowly job, someone without power, forced to work. But I have cousins and friends who work in nail salons and they make loads of money,” she said on an episode of Bookends with Mattea Roach.
They know everything about the person who’s sitting in my chair just by looking at their toes or their hands.– Souvankham Thammavongsa
“If you’ve ever had a conversation with anyone who works in a salon, they’ve got really hilarious stories and I wanted to show, right from the start, that it looks like they’re not in charge, but they are. They know everything about the person who’s sitting in my chair just by looking at their toes or their hands.”
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.
