Elizabeth Hay has won the Giller Prize for Canadian literature, the country's richest literary prize, for her novel Late Nights on Air, the CBC
reported. "I'm very thrilled and very lucky," she said, after accepting
the $40,000 award last night. "So lucky in fact, I'll probably be hit
by a truck tomorrow."
CBC described the book as "the sometimes comic, sometimes tragic tale
centred on the cast of characters at a small radio station in the
Canadian North." The jury called Late Nights on Air "flawlessly
crafted, a timeless story masterfully told," and jury member David
Bergen commented, "What a cast of characters. It's as if she took a
cast of characters and she found a room to put them in and that room is
the North."
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Talk about a longlist.
Some 137 titles have been nominated by libraries around the world for
the 2008 International Impac Dublin Literary Award, which carries a prize of
100,000 euros (about $US145,000) for the best literary work of the
year. The Guardian has fun discussing some of the titles on the longlist, which it calls "a monster."
The shortlist will be announced April 2 and the winner on June 12.