The Giller Prize is a literary award given to a Canadian author of a novel or short story collection published in English the previous year, after an annual juried competition between publishers who submit entries. The prize was established in 1994 by Toronto businessman Jack Rabinovitch in honour of his late wife Doris Giller, a former literary editor at the Toronto Star, and is awarded in November of each year along with a cash reward with the winner being presented by the previous year's winning author.
Absalom, Absalom! is a novel by the American author William Faulkner, first published in 1936. Taking place before, during, and after the American Civil War, it is a story about three families of the American South, with a focus on the life of Thomas Sutpen.
African American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. It begins with the works of such late 18th-century writers as Phillis Wheatley. Before the high point of enslaved people narratives, African American literature was dominated by autobiographical spiritual narratives. The genre known as slave narratives in the 19th century were accounts by people who had generally escaped from slavery, about their journeys to freedom and ways they claimed their lives. The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s was a great period of flowering in literature and the arts, influenced both by writers who came North in the Great Migration and those who were immigrants from Jamaica and other Caribbean islands. African American writers have been recognized by the highest awards, including the Nobel Prize given to Toni Morrison in 1993. Among the themes and issues explored in this literature are the role of African Americans within the larger American society, African American culture, racism, slavery, and social equality. African-American writing has tended to incorporate oral forms, such as spirituals, sermons, gospel music, blues, or rap.
The Confessions of Nat Turner is a 1967 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by American writer William Styron. Presented as a first-person narrative by historical figure Nat Turner, the novel concerns Nat Turner's slave rebellion in Virginia in 1831, but does not always depict the events accurately. It is based on The Confessions of Nat Turner: The Leader of the Late Insurrection in Southampton, Virginia, a first-hand account of Turner's confessions published by a local lawyer, Thomas Ruffin Gray, in 1831.
Kindred (1979) is a novel by American writer Octavia E. Butler that incorporates time travel and is modeled on slave narratives. Widely popular, it has frequently been chosen as a text by community-wide reading programs and book organizations, and for high school and college courses.
Rawi Hage is a Lebanese-Canadian journalist, novelist, and photographer based in Montreal, Quebec, in Canada.
Twelve Years a Slave is an 1853 memoir and slave narrative by Solomon Northup as told to and written by David Wilson. Northup, a black man who was born free in New York state, details himself being tricked to go to Washington, D.C., where he was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the Deep South. He was in bondage for 12 years in Louisiana before he was able to secretly get information to friends and family in New York, who in turn secured his release with the aid of the state. Northup's account provides extensive details on the slave markets in Washington, D.C., and New Orleans, and describes at length cotton and sugar cultivation and slave treatment on major plantations in Louisiana.
Kyle Elihu Onstott was an American novelist, known for his best-selling novel Mandingo (1957), which deals with slavery on an Alabama plantation with the fictional name of Falconhurst in the 1830s. The book was made into a 1961 play and film of the same name, which was released in 1975.
Patrick deWitt is a Canadian novelist and screenwriter. Born on Vancouver Island, deWitt lives in Portland, Oregon and has acquired American citizenship. As of 2023, he has written five novels: Ablutions (2009), The Sisters Brothers (2011), Undermajordomo Minor (2015), French Exit (2018) and The Librarianist (2023).
Esi Edugyan is a Canadian novelist. She has twice won the Giller Prize, for her novels Half-Blood Blues (2011) and Washington Black (2018).
Half-Blood Blues is a fiction novel by Canadian writer Esi Edugyan, and first published in June 2011 by Serpent’s Tail. The book's dual narrative centers around Sidney "Sid" Griffiths, a journeyman jazz bassist. Griffiths' friend and bandmate, Hieronymus "Hiero" Falk, is caught on the wrong side of 1939 Nazi ideology and is essentially lost to history. Some of his music survives, however, and half a century later, fans of Falk discover his forgotten story.
The Long Song is a historical novel by Andrea Levy published in 2010 that was the recipient of the Walter Scott Prize. It was Levy's fifth and final novel, following the 2004 publication of Small Island. In December 2018, a three-part television adaptation of the same name was broadcast on BBC One; The Long Song was aired on PBS in February 2021.
Underground Airlines is a 2016 science fiction novel by American writer Ben Winters, set in a contemporary alternate-history United States where the American Civil War never occurred because Abraham Lincoln was assassinated prior to his 1861 inauguration and a version of the Crittenden Compromise was adopted instead. As a result, slavery has remained legal in the "Hard Four" : Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and a unified Carolina. Its name evokes the Underground Railroad in relations to its setting. The novel attracted praise for exploring racism through the alternate-history mechanism.
The Underground Railroad is a historical fiction novel by American author Colson Whitehead, published by Doubleday in 2016. The alternate history novel tells the story of Cora, a slave in the Antebellum South during the 19th century, who makes a bid for freedom from her Georgia plantation by following the Underground Railroad, which the novel depicts as a rail transport system with safe houses and secret routes. The book was a critical and commercial success, hitting the bestseller lists and winning several literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the National Book Award for Fiction, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the 2017 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence. A TV miniseries adaptation, written and directed by Barry Jenkins, was released in May 2021.
Homegoing is the debut historical fiction novel by Ghanaian-American author Yaa Gyasi, published in 2016. Each chapter in the novel follows a different descendant of an Asante woman named Maame, starting with her two daughters, who are half-sisters, separated by circumstance: Effia marries James Collins, the British governor in charge of Cape Coast Castle, while her half-sister Esi is held captive in the dungeons below. Subsequent chapters follow their children and following generations.
Joshua Whitehead is a Canadian First Nations, two spirit poet and novelist.
Selwyn Seyfu Hinds is an American screenwriter, comic book writer, film producer and former editor and journalist. He has been editor-in-chief of the hip-hop magazine The Source. He has written for The Twilight Zone 2019 TV series produced by Jordan Peele, and he has been selected to write and co-executive produce the TV series adaptation of Nnedi Okorafor's award-winning novel Who Fears Death?, with George R. R. Martin as executive producer. He is currently serving as creator, showrunner, and executive producer on the Hulu limited series Washington Black, based on the 2018 novel by Esi Edugyan.
Bluebird, Bluebird is a 2017 novel by Attica Locke. Its main character is an African-American Texas Ranger, Darren Matthews, from the eastern part of the state. He investigates the death of another African-American, a Chicago lawyer named Michael Wright, in the town of Lark.
Washington Black is an upcoming nine-part television for Hulu. It is an adaptation of the book of the same name by Esi Edugyan.
