May 6, 1999
JURY PANEL ANNOUNCED FOR THE 1999 GILLER PRIZE

Jack Rabinovitch, founder of The Giller Prize, is pleased to announce that author/editor/anthologist Alberto Manguel, bookseller Judith Mappin, and author Nino Ricci will comprise the 1999 Giller Prize jury.

Alberto Manguel was born in Buenos Aires and has lived in Italy, France, England, and Tahiti, where he worked as a translator, publisher, and writer. He came to Canada in 1982 in order to work on The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, which proved an international sensation, and decided to make Canada his home. Manguel is also the author of the internationally acclaimed bestsellers, A History of Reading, which won France's prestigious Prix de Medicis for its French translation last year, the novel News from a Foreign Country Came, and anthologies including Black Water (volumes I and II), Meanwhile, In Another Part of the Forest (with Craig Stephenson), and The Gates of Paradise. He is currently living in Calgary, where he is the international Writer-in-Residence with the Mark Flanagan Distinguished Writers Program at the University of Calgary.

Judith Mappin was born and raised in Toronto but lived in Montreal during her university years studying chemistry at McGill. After working for a year at the Banting Institute in Toronto, she returned to live in Montreal when she married John Mappin. In 1974, with two partners, she opened the Double Hook Book Shop in Montreal, selling books by Canadian authors. In the twenty-five years since it opened, The Double Hook has become one of Canada's pre-eminent bookstores and Ms. Mappin, a past Director of the Canadian Booksellers Association, has earned a reputation as one of Canada's most esteemed booksellers.

Nino Ricci was born in 1959 in Leamington, Ontario. His first novel, Lives of the Saints (1990), the first volume in a trilogy, was published to critical acclaim in Canada and around the world, including the U.S., the U.K., France, Spain, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Holland, and Italy. In Canada, it won the Governor General's Award for Fiction, as well as the F.G. Bressani Prize and the W.H. Smith/Books in Canada First Novel Award. In the U.K., the book won the Betty Trask Award and the Winifred Holtby Prize and in the U.S., it was shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. The second volume of Mr. Ricci's trilogy, In a Glass House, was published in 1993 and the third volume, Where She Has Gone, was published in 1997 and shortlisted for The Giller Prize that year. Nino Ricci now lives in Toronto.

Dates Confirmed
This year, the shortlist is scheduled to be announced at a press conference in Toronto on Monday, October 4. The winner will be announced at a black-tie dinner and awards ceremony at Toronto's Four Seasons Hotel, to be held on Wednesday, November 3, 1999.

Prize History
The Giller Prize awards $25,000 annually to the author of the best Canadian novel or short story collection published in English. The award was established in 1994 by Toronto businessman Jack Rabinovitch in honour of his late wife, literary journalist Doris Giller.

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