Anne Michaels wins the $100K Giller Prize for novel Held

Anne Michaels has won the 2024 Giller Prize for her novel Held. 

The $100,000 prize is the richest in Canadian literature.

Based in Toronto, Michaels is a poet and author who has previously won major literary awards including the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, the Trillium Book Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Before taking home this year's prize, she was shortlisted for the Giller Prize twice: in 1996 for Fugitive Pieces and in 2009 for The Winter Vault. 

In her acceptance speech, she said that her writing is a way of bearing witness "against war, indifference, against amnesia of every sort."

"When writer and reader meet each other's gaze on the page, there's the possibility that something can be mended. Literature situates us morally. It recognizes the crucial distinction between what is impossible and what is futile."

"Everything I write is against futility. There's no moral righteousness. There is only morality. A book, especially this book, is nothing if it does not listen. Every book bears witness, every book its own form of resistance and assertion."

"I'm here tonight in solidarity with that purpose, in solidarity with the longlisted and shortlisted writers and every writer inside and outside this room."

Weaving in historical figures and events, the mysterious, generations-spanning novel Held begins on a First World War battlefield near the River Aisne in 1917, where John lies in the falling snow, unable to move or feel his legs. It jumps in time and place to explore a fragmented picture of war and those who feel its reverberations.

"The narrative dips in and out of various places and times, and in many ways is trying to express all the ways that love continues its work past the span of a single life," said Michaels in an interview with Q's Tom Power.

"We're used to thinking about history as actions and events, but it's also the story of our inner lives, the force of our inner lives, what we believe in, what we aspire to, what our values are. And I wanted to really bring us to present moments in relationship to history that have to do with the power of that inner life."

Held was also shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. 

The remaining finalists are Éric Chacour for What I Know About You, translated by Pablo Strauss, Anne Fleming for Curiosities, Conor Kerr for Prairie Edge and Deepa Rajagopalan for Peacocks of Instagram. They will each receive $10,000.

The shortlisted books are available in accessible formats through the National Network for Equitable Library Services and the Centre for Equitable Library Access. 

Publishers submitted over 100 titles for consideration, which was narrowed down to a 12-title longlist before the reveal of the five-book shortlist.