Edmonton’s Lynn Coady won the 2013 Scotiabank Giller Prize for her short story collection Hellgoing.
According to Toronto Star, Coady also collects a $50,000 monetary prize for her short story collection. The writer was a 2011 Giller finalist for The Antagonist, but was beat out by Esi Edugyan.
Coady, in a speech at a black-tie gala in Toronto, said that the win was “shocking and overwhelming.”
The Giller Prize was launched in by Jack Rabinovitch in 1994 to honor his late wife Doris Giller, who was a literary journalist.
CBC reports that Coady broke down into tears while giving her speech. She thanked her family and her husband and joked she “[doesn’t] even like to cry in private.” She added, “This is amazing.”
The Giller Prize jury for 2013 consisted of Edguyen, Jonathan Lethem and Margaret Atwood. They said that Hellgoing is “magically united by Coady’s vivid and iconoclastic language, which brims with keen sympathetic wit…Coady offers a worldview full of mournful humor, ready indignation, and vertiginous possibility; the reader feels in the presence of life itself.”
The other four in the running for the Giller Prize were Dennis Bock for Going Home Again, Craig Davidson for Cataract City, Lisa Moore for Caught and Dan Vyleta for The Crooked Maid.