Dionne Irving to chair 2025 Giller Prize jury
The Ontario author is joined by Jordan Abel, Loghan Paylor, Deepa Rajagopalan and Aaron Tucker
Canadian author Dionne Irving is the chair of the 2025 Giller Prize jury.
The $100,000 prize is the biggest in Canadian literature.
Irving is from Mississauga, Ont., and is currently a creative writing professor at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. Her debut short story collection, The Islands, was shortlisted for the 2023 Scotiabank Giller Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the New American Voices Award and the Clara Johnson Award.
She released her first novel, Quint, in 2021 and her work has been featured in journals and magazines like LitHub, Missouri Review and New Delta Review.
For the 2025 Giller Prize, she is joined by jurors Jordan Abel, Loghan Paylor, Deepa Rajagopalan and Aaron Tucker.
Nisga'a writer Abel won the 2024 Governor General's Literary Award for fiction and the 2024 Amazon First Novel Award for his novel Empty Spaces. He is also the author of the poetry collections The Place of Scraps, which won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, Un/inhabited and Injun, which won the Griffin Poetry Prize.
His memoir Nishga won the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize and the VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres Award. Abel has a PhD from Simon Fraser University and is an associate professor at the University of Alberta.
Paylor is an Ontario-born queer and trans author currently based in Abbotsford, B.C. Their debut novel, The Cure for Drowning, was on the longlist for the 2024 Giller Prize and was named a Globe and Mail Best Book of 2024.
They have an MA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia and their short fiction and essays have previously appeared in publications including Room and Prairie Fire.
Rajagopalan was the 2021 RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award winner. Her debut short story collection, Peacocks of Instagram, was on the shortlist for the 2024 Giller Prize. Born to Indian parents in Saudi Arabia, she has lived across India, the United States and Canada.
Her previous writing has appeared in publications such as the Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology, the New Quarterly, Room and Arc. Rajagopalan lives and works in Toronto.
Tucker is the writer of seven books including Hunters, Not Cowboys, Y: Oppenheimer and Horseman of Los Alamos. His academic work has won the Governor General's Gold Medal and he is currently an assistant professor at Memorial University in St. John's. In 2022, Tucker made the CBC Nonfiction Prize longlist for A Cowboy's Work.
2025 will mark the 32st anniversary of the Giller Prize. Books published between Oct. 1, 2024 and Sept. 30, 2025 will be eligible for the 2025 prize. The longlist, shortlist and winner will be announced in the fall.
Jack Rabinovitch founded the prize in honour of his late wife Doris Giller in 1994. Rabinovitch died in 2017 at the age of 87.
The 2024 winner was Anne Michaels for her novel Held.
Other past Giller Prize winners include Sarah Bernstein for Study for Obedience, Suzette Mayr for The Sleeping Car Porter, Omar El Akkad for What Strange Paradise, Souvankham Thammavongsa for How to Pronounce Knife, Esi Edugyan for Washington Black and Half-Blood Blues, Margaret Atwood for Alias Grace and Ian Williams for Reproduction.
The Giller Prize is currently hosting a monthly virtual book club featuring the 2024 longlisted writers.
