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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