Suzette Mayr wins $100,000 Giller Prize for ‘The Sleeping Car Porter’

Suzette Mayr is the winner of the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize. The announcement was made at a gala ceremony at the Four Seasons Hotel in Toronto on Monday night hosted by Brampton poet Rupi Kaur and award-winning actress and producer Sarah Gadon.

The Calgary-based Mayr won for for her novel “The Sleeping Car Porter,” from Coach House Books, which follows a queer, Black sleeping car porter making a treacherous trip from Montreal to Vancouver in 1929. She was previously longlisted for the prize in 2011 for her novel “Monoceros.”

“I think I’m officially done with my feelings of imposter syndrome as a writer,” Mayr said through tears.

In an interview with the Star a short time later, she said that “writing is such a solitary act. I’ve written five books before this that have gotten a little bit of attention but not a ton. Even though I love writing and I’ll always continue to write, sometimes when you don’t get nominated for awards or you start to wonder if maybe you’re in the right profession.”

The $100,000 prize is the largest purse in Canadian literature and is awarded to the best book of fiction — whether a novel or short stories — each year.

When asked what she hoped the win does for the LGBTQ community, Mayr said, “I hope it helps create a little bit more compassion and I hope it helps some of us who are scared … a bit of consolation, some sort of sanctuary. I want to give people comfort and let them know they’re not alone.”

The other four finalists, who each receive an award of $10,000, were: Kim Fu, for her short story collection “Lesser-Known Monsters of the 21st Century,” published by Coach House Books; Rawi Hage, for his short story collection “Stray Dogs,” published by Knopf Canada; Tsering Yangzom Lama for her novel “We Measure The Earth With Our Bodies,” published by McClelland & Stewart; and Noor Naga for her novel “If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English,” published by Graywolf Press.

This year’s jury chair, Casey Plett, was joined by fellow Canadian writers Kaie Kellough and Waubgeshig Rice, as well as U.S. authors Katie Kitamura and Scott Spencer to decide the winner. They read 138 books submitted by publishers from across the country. Those books were whittled down to a long list of 14 books, which then became the final five.

In an interview when that list was released, Plett said that “We don’t feel any conflict or second-guessing about the choices we made,” she said. “It was all consensus. There was no bitter, last-minute horse trading. We’re very different readers, but there was no group think.”

The Giller Prize was founded in 1994 by businessman and philanthropist Jack Rabinovitch, who died in 2017, to honour his wife, Doris Giller, a literary journalist and former Toronto Star books editor. That first year featured a prize of $25,000 awarded to the winner, M.G. Vassanji for his book “The Book of Secrets,” while last year’s prize, now worth $100,000 to the winner, was awarded to Omar El Akkad for his book “What Strange Paradise.” Other winners include André Alexis, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Ian Williams among many other now household names.

And, just because it’s a tradition carried on by the Giller organizers, which include his daughters, we’ll end as Jack Rabinovitch always did: “For the price of a dinner in this town, you can buy all the nominated books. So, eat at home and buy the books.”

SHARE: