November 3, 1998
AUTHOR ALICE MUNRO
WINS THE 1998 GILLER PRIZE
Canada's Premier Prize for Fiction Names A Winner
TORONTO - At a gala dinner and award ceremony
that drew over 400 members of the publishing industry and
arts community, Alice Munro was named as the 1998 winner
of The Giller Prize, Canada's premier literary prize for
fiction. Alice Munro's winning collection of short stories,
The Love of a Good Woman, is published by McClelland
& Stewart / A Douglas Gibson Book. The largest annual
prize for fiction in the country, The Giller Prize awards
$25,000 each year to the author of the best Canadian novel
or short story collection published in English. A shortlist
of six finalists was announced on October 5, 1998.
Those finalists were:
- André Alexis for Childhood, published
by McClelland & Stewart
- Gail Anderson-Dargatz for A Recipe for Bees,
published by Alfred A. Knopf Canada
- Barbara Gowdy for The White Bone, published by
HarperFlamingoCanada
- Greg Hollingshead for The Healer, published by
HarperFlamingoCanada / A Phyllis Bruce Book
- Wayne Johnston for The Colony of Unrequited Dreams,
published by Alfred A. Knopf Canada
- Alice Munro for The Love of a Good Woman, published
by McClelland & Stewart / A Douglas Gibson Book
Selected by a distinguished jury panel, comprised
of authors Margaret Atwood and Guy Vanderhaeghe and writer/broadcaster
Peter Gzowski, the finalists were chosen from over 60 books
submitted for consideration.
Of the winning book, the jury remarked, "The
Love of a Good Woman is a collection of eight short
stories which probes the heart of love. These stories are
lit with the startling insights characteristic of the very
best short fiction, what Nadine Gordimer has called 'the
flash of fireflies.' The work of a mature vision, they shed
another kind of light, one with the strength to illuminate
whole worlds."
ABOUT THE WINNER
Alice Munro has won the Governor General's Award three times,
for Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), for Who
Do You Think You Are? (1978), and for The Progress
of Love (1986), which was also selected as one of the
Best Books of the Year by The New York Times. Her last new
collection, Open Secrets, won the W.H. Smith Award
for the best book published in the U.K. in 1995. In 1996,
The New York Times listed Selected Stories among
the top eight fiction books of the year, and in December,
1997, she was the first non-American to receive the PEN/Malamud
Award for Excellence in Short Fiction.
The Giller Prize was founded by Jack
Rabinovitch in 1994 in honour of his late wife, literary
journalist Doris Giller. This year marks the fifth anniversary
of The Giller Prize and was the first time ever that the
awards were broadcast live: Bravo! NewStyleArtsChannel aired
the proceedings from 9 to 10 p.m. EST.
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