Everything You Need to Know About the 2025 Giller Prize Finalists

What is the Giller Prize?

The Giller Prize is Canada’s most influential award for fiction, created in 1994 by Jack Rabinovitch to honour his wife, literary journalist Doris Giller. It celebrates the best Canadian novel, graphic novel or short story collection published in English each year.

• Winner’s purse: $100,000

• Each finalist: $10,000

• The 2025 ceremony took place on 17 November 2025 in Toronto, broadcast nationally on CBC TV, CBC Gem and CBC’s YouTube channel.

CTV described it simply as the prize for the “best work of Canadian fiction” being handed out in Toronto that night – a line that captures the weight the award carries in the country’s literary calendar.

Meet the 2025 Giller Prize finalists

This year’s 2025 Giller Prize finalists were five very different books chosen from more than 100 submissions by a three-person jury: Dionne Irving (chair), Loghan Paylor and Deepa Rajagopalan. Souvankham Thammavongsa – Pick a Colour (winner)

Status: Winner, 2025 Giller Prize

Thammavongsa’s first novel, Pick a Colour, follows a former boxer who now works as a manicurist over the course of a single summer day in her nail salon. The jury describes the book as a portrait of a woman whose outward anonymity hides a sharp, restless inner life, challenging readers to think differently about everyday service work and who we consider “intelligent”.

The novel “decentralizes the English language” with what the jury calls crackling wit and profound confidence, asking us never to look at a nail salon – or its workers – in the same way again.

Thammavongsa is already a major name in Canadian letters: her 2020 short story collection How to Pronounce Knife  won the Giller Prize and later the Trillium Book Award. She has also published four poetry collections and has appeared in outlets such as The New Yorker and Granta.

Winning again in 2025 makes her a two-time Giller Prize recipient – a rare achievement that underlines just how strongly the jury responded to Pick a Colour.

Mona Awad – We Love You, Bunny

Mona Awad’s We Love You, Bunny returns to the off-kilter campus universe of her cult 2019 novel Bunny. The publisher describes it as a “surreal, satiric, pitch-black plunge” back into the so-called Bunny-verse, functioning as both a prequel and a sequel while still standing alone.

Reviews note that the book follows Samantha, now a novelist on book tour, as she’s pulled once more into the ultra-feminine, macabre “Bunnies” clique at a fictional Ivy League–style university. The novel plays with horror, dark comedy and “dark enchantment” to interrogate creativity, female friendship and the performance of femininity.

For Giller readers, We Love You, Bunny offers a highly stylised, gothic campus satire – a contrast to the quieter realism of some of the other finalists.

Eddy Boudel Tan – The Tiger and the Cosmonaut

Eddy Boudel Tan’s The Tiger and the Cosmonaut is billed as an “atmospheric page-turner” and a noirish family suspense novel.

Set in a small town in British Columbia, it centres on a Chinese Canadian family wrestling with the mysterious disappearance of a loved one and the unresolved grief and anger that follow. Critics highlight how the book blends the pleasures of a thriller — clues, witness statements, revelations — with a deeper character study about identity, belonging and the pressures placed on immigrant families.

Shortlisted for the Giller, the novel confirms Boudel Tan’s reputation for queer, emotionally rich suspense fiction rooted in contemporary Canadian life.

Emma Donoghue – The Paris Express

Emma Donoghue’s historical novel The Paris Express takes readers onto a steam train hurtling through the French countryside in 1895, inspired by the real-life Montparnasse derailment in Paris.

The book gathers a cross-section of society — from members of Parliament to a Black American painter, a female scientist and railway workers — in a confined setting that gradually becomes a pressure cooker. One character, a young radical carrying a homemade bomb, adds to the sense of countdown and moral tension.

Reviewers praise The Paris Express as a blend of social commentary and page-turning suspense, echoing the structure of classic train mysteries while speaking directly to contemporary questions about inequality and political violence.

Emma Knight – The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus

Emma Knight’s The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus is described by its publisher as “witty, warm and wildly unputdownable.” 

The novel follows two friends during their first year at the University of Edinburgh, weaving together themes of womanhood, motherhood, desire and long-term friendship. Reviews emphasise its mix of humour and emotional honesty: a contemporary story that uses the metaphor of the octopus — and its famously demanding reproductive cycle — to explore how women balance care, ambition and self-preservation.

On the Giller list, it stands out as a coming-of-age and friendship novel with a sharp eye for the joys and exhaustion of modern womanhood.

How the 2025 Giller Prize was decided

The 2025 Giller Prize process unfolded across several key dates:

• Longlist announcement: 15 September 2025 – 14 titles

• Shortlist announcement: 6 October 2025 – the five finalists above

• Winner announcement: 17 November 2025, at a televised ceremony in Toronto hosted by Rick Mercer

The jury — Dionne Irving, Loghan Paylor and Deepa Rajagopalan — read more than 100 works of fiction to arrive at a shortlist that they say showcases books that are “highly readable, deeply immersive, and profoundly unique”.

On the night, they awarded the $100,000 prize to Souvankham Thammavongsa’s Pick a Colour, with each of the four other finalists receiving $10,000.  As winner, Thammavongsa also receives a two-week writer’s residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and will be honoured at the San Miguel Writers’ Conference & Literary Festival in Mexico in early 2026.

Why this shortlist matters

Taken together, the 2025 Giller Prize finalists give a snapshot of where Canadian fiction is right now:

• A nail-salon novel that rethinks class and intelligence (Pick a Colour).

• A darkly comic campus horror about creativity and female friendship (We Love You, Bunny).

• A queer, family-centred mystery in small-town British Columbia (The Tiger and the Cosmonaut).

• A historical train thriller that doubles as social critique (The Paris Express).

• A sharp contemporary novel about friendship, motherhood and choice (The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus).

For readers — in Canada, the UK and beyond — it’s one of the most efficient reading lists you can get: five very different, high-calibre books, plus a winner whose voice has now twice convinced a national jury.

If you’re building a feature for Niche Magazine , a simple service angle could be:

• “Start with the winner: Pick a Colour.”

• “Then choose your lane — dark campus, family suspense, historical thriller or friendship novel — from the remaining four.”

Either way, this year’s Giller Prize makes a strong case that some of the most interesting fiction of 2025 is coming out of Canada.