Anne Michaels was awarded the 2024 Giller Prize at a ceremony in Toronto on November 18. (Ryan Emberley)

Novelist and poet Anne Michaels has won the 2024 Giller Prize.

Michaels was awarded the $100,000 prize for her novel Held at a ceremony in Toronto at the Park Hyatt Hotel on Nov. 18.

“Everything I write is a form of witness, against war, indifference, against amnesia of every sort,” she said in her acceptance speech. “Literature situates us morally. It recognizes the crucial distinction between what is impossible and what is futile. … I am here because a book is not about the writer but the reader; it is the reader who holds the true moral power that a book can offer.”

Held, published by McClelland & Stewart, opens on a battlefield in France in 1917 where John lies wounded, and moves back and forth in time, connecting the descendants of John and his wife Helena as they move around Europe and England. In their citation, the jury, comprised of Canadian writers Noah Richler and Kevin Chong and Canadian singer-songwriter Molly Johnson, called Held “a novel that floats, a beguiling association of memories, projections, and haunted instances through which the very notion of our mortality, of our resilience and desires, is interrogated in passages as impactful as they can be hypnotic.” The book was also shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize. Michaels has been shortlisted for the Giller twice previously for her other two novels, Fugitive Pieces (which won the Orange Prize for Fiction) and The Winter Vault. 

Michaels thanked her publisher, McClelland & Stewart and Penguin Random House Canada, and said she felt a great solidarity with the other shortlisted writers.

Éric Chacour was shortlisted for What I Know About You, translated by Pablo Strauss (Coach House Books); Conor Kerr was shortlisted for his novel Prairie Edge (Strange Light/PRHC); Anne Fleming was shortlisted for Curiosities (Knopf Canada/PRHC); and Deepa Rajagopalan was shortlisted for her short fiction collection Peacocks of Instagram (Astoria/House of Anansi Press). Each of them receives $10,000. 

Before announcing the winner, executive director of the Giller Prize Foundation, said she “remain[s] emboldened by my father Jack’s singular vision in creating this prize for the recognition and celebration of Canadian fiction. It is and will always be about the author’s voices and nothing more.”

The Giller has been marked by controversy since the 2023 gala was interrupted by protesters who disrupted the event to decry main prize sponsor Scotiabank’s investment in Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems. A group of authors concerned over the protesters’ arrests formed in the days after the event. Canlit Responds has continued to protest Scotiabank’s investment in the prize, calling for writers to refrain from submitting their books for consideration for this year’s Giller prize. More than 40 authors, including previous winners of the prize, have signed that letter.

The prize’s two international jurors resigned from their roles in July.

The Giller Foundation dropped Scotiabank’s name from the prize but it remains a lead sponsor.

A group of protesters gathered outside of the Park Hyatt Hotel on Monday night to protest the continued involvement of Scotiabank, as well as Indigo and the Azrieli Foundation, with the prize. Writers also gathered in Fredericton, Montreal, Halifax, Winnipeg, and Vancouver in events called the No Arms in the Arts Tour.