Introducing the 2017 Scotiabank Giller Prize Jury

TORONTO, ON--(Marketwired - January 16, 2017) - Elana Rabinovitch, Executive Director of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, today announced the five member jury panel for the 2017 Scotiabank Giller Prize.

The 2017 jury members are:

Canadian writers André Alexis, Anita Rau Badami (Jury Chair) and Lynn Coady, along with British author Richard Beard and American writer and playwright Nathan Englander.

Some background on the 2017 jury:

André Alexis was born in Trinidad and grew up in Canada. His novel, Fifteen Dogs, won the 2015 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. His debut novel, Childhood, won the Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Trillium Book Award, and was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and the Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. His other books include Pastoral (nominated for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize), Asylum, Beauty and Sadness and Ingrid & the Wolf. His latest novel, The Hidden Keys, was published in 2016.

Anita Rau Badami is the author of four novels: Tamarind Mem, The Hero's Walk, Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? and Tell it to the Trees. She is the recipient of various awards including the Marian Engel Prize, the Regional Commonwealth Award, and the Premio Berto Prize for International Literature. Published worldwide, her novels have also been nominated for the Ethel Wilson Prize, Hugh MacLennan Prize, the Orange Prize, the Kiriyama Prize, and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. The Hero's Walk was a finalist for CBC Radio's Canada Reads in 2016. Born in India, Anita lives in Montreal, Quebec.

Richard Beard's six novels include Lazarus is Dead, Dry Bones and Damascus, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His latest novel Acts of the Assassins was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize in 2015. He is also the author of four books of narrative non-fiction, including his 2017 memoir The Day That Went Missing. Formerly Director of The National Academy of Writing in London, he is a Visiting Professor (2016/17) at the University of Tokyo , and has a Creative Writing Fellowship at the University of East Anglia.

Lynn Coady is a novelist whose fiction has been garnering acclaim since her first novel, Strange Heaven, was published and subsequently nominated for Canada's Governor General's Award for Fiction when she was 28. Her short story collection, Hellgoing, won the 2013 Scotiabank Giller Prize, for which her novel, The Antagonist, was also nominated in 2011. Her fiction has been published in the U.K., U.S., Holland, France, and Germany. Her most recent book is a nonfiction enquiry into reading and digital culture called Who Needs Books? Coady lives in Toronto and writes for television.