Michaels wins 2024 Giller Prize for ‘Held’
Anne Michaels has won the C$100,000 (A$110,028) Giller Prize, Canada’s richest literary award, for her novel Held (Bloomsbury).
Of the book, the judging panel wrote: ‘Held is a novel that floats, a beguiling association of memories, projections, and haunted instances through which the very notion of our mortality, of our resilience and desires, is interrogated in passages as impactful as they can be hypnotic. Ostensibly Held begins with a man, John, lying injured on a First World War battlefield, who returns, broken, to the woman he loves and his Yorkshire photography studio, where ghostly figures emerge from the shadows of the photographs he develops—the sorts of “images that can, like certain rhythms, dismantle us”. In a story of querulous fragments refuting a novel’s usual form, Michaels conveys war’s legacy of harm and trauma reverberating across generations, but through them all our irrefutable connectedness. Michaels’ mastery of word and situations is understated but insistent, an altogether successful reliance that deflects attention from its author and embeds the reader in the resoundingly mysterious and ephemeral.’
Michaels was shortlisted for the prize alongside four other authors, each of whom received C$10,000 (A$11,003): Éric Chacour for his novel What I Know About You (translated by Pablo Strauss, Gallic Books); Anne Fleming for her novel Curiosities (Knopf Canada); Conor Kerr for his novel Prairie Edge (University of Minnesota Press); and Deepa Rajagopalan for her short story collection Peacocks of Instagram (House of Anansi Press).
A crowd outside the venue of the Giller Prize ceremony protested the Giller Foundation and the connections its major sponsors have with Israel Defense Forces, reported Publishers Weekly.
The winner of the 2023 Giller Prize was Sarah Bernstein for her novel Study for Obedience (Granta).
Category: International awards International news
