André Alexis wins Canada’s most prestigious literary award – The Giller Prize

André Alexis has won one of Canada’s most prestigious literary awards for his novel Fifteen Dogs“.

Alexis won the Scotiabank Giller Prize Tuesday for his book about 15 dogs gifted by gods with human traits.

The CAD$100,000 (US$75,000) Giller Prize honors the best in Canadian fiction and is the richest prize for fiction in North America.

Alexis joked the money will simply get him out of debt as a writer.

Alexis, who also won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize last week, has now earned 2 of the country’s 3 major fiction awards.

“I did not think that I was going to win it,” he said backstage after accepting the award. “I never think that I am going to win anything. My own feeling is that if you get too absorbed in thinking about winning and losing, then you get disappointed if you lose and you get too weird if you win. I like to keep myself on an even keel.”

Past winners have included Margaret Atwood, Mordecai Richler and Alice Munro.

The 58-year-old Alexis, was born in Trinidad & Tobago, and raised in Ottawa, he was a finalist for the Giller Prize in 1998 – his debut novel, Childhood, ultimately lost to Alice Munro’s The Love of a Good Woman.

His other work includes plays (Lambton Kent), a book for young readers (Ingrid and the Wolf) and a collection of essays and short fiction (Beauty and Sadness). Fifteen Dogs is the second volume in Mr. Alexis’s “quincrux” of novels, as he calls the project, the first of which, Pastoral, was published last year. The third instalment, The Hidden Keys, will be released in 2016.

The Giller was created in 1994 by businessman Jack Rabinovitch in memory of his late wife, literary journalist Doris Giller.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation broadcast the glitzy awards show across Canada.

Source: Associated Press