Elizabeth HAY wins the 2007 Scotiabank Giller Prize for Fiction

ELIZABETH HAY has won the 2007 Scotiabank Giller Prize for Fiction for her third novel, Late Nights on Air (McClelland & Stewart, 2007), beating literary heavyweights and former Giller Prize winners Michael Ondaatje and M.G. Vassanji. The former radio journalist won the highest Canadian literary honour, the Canadian equivalent to the British Man Booker Prize, for a novel about a group of eccentrics working in a Canadian radio station in the 1970s.

The Scotiabank Giller Prize is probably the leading Canadian prize for fiction and certainly the one with the most hoopla and dollars attached. Both novels and short-story collections are eligible for this prize. Ondaatje has won the Giller Prize once before while Vassanji has won it twice before. Ondaatje won in 2000 for Anil’s Ghost; Vassanji won in 1994 for The Book of Secrets and in 2003 for The In-Between World of Vikram Lall. Competing for the prestigious prize this year are the following authors and their novels:

1. Late Nights on Air (McClelland & Stewart, 2007) / Elizabeth Hay
2. Divisadero (McClelland & Stewart, 2007) / Michael Ondaatje
3. A Secret Between Us (trans. from the French by Donald Winkler) (Douglas & McIntyre, 2007) / Daniel Poliquin
4. The Assassin’s Song (Doubleday Canada, 2007) / M.G. Vassanji
5. Effigy (Random House Canada, 2007) / Alissa York