Fourteen outstanding Canadian books have been named to the 2026 Giller Prize longlist. Founded in 1994, the Giller Prize is Canada’s most prestigious literary award for fiction, recognizing excellence in Canadian storytelling and awarding $100,000 to the winning author and $10,000 to each finalist.
This year marks a milestone for the prize, with the Giller announcing its first-ever jury composed entirely of independent Canadian booksellers, bringing a unique bookseller perspective to the selection process.
Among the 14 longlisted titles, four books are written by British Columbia-born or based authors, highlighting the province’s continued contribution to Canada’s literary landscape.
The 2026 shortlist will be announced on October 5, with the winner revealed at the annual Giller Prize ceremony on November 16.
Read on to discover the four B.C. authors and books that earned a place on this year’s longlist:
Dodge City by Patrick deWitt
It’s 1967 in Los Angeles and Lee Clarke has received his draft notice, calling him up to fight in the Vietnam War. A straitlaced, apolitical twenty-three-year-old from Washington, Lee is studying at UCLA until a fistfight leads to his expulsion—and his removal from the deferment list. The draft notice forces him to make the first political decision of his life and decide to flee the country and head for the border. He signs up at a drive-away car-delivery service, chancing into a showroom-new Jaguar bound for the East Coast.
Bringing only a single suitcase and a bag of amphetamines, he makes his stimulated progress against the width of the country, pining for the life he’s left behind and wondering what his decision will mean for his future. But he is not just saying goodbye to the country of his birth. In four different towns strung out along the northern United States, Lee visits each member of his immediate family: his father, a World War II veteran in a state of degradation; his mother, engaged in a buoyantly manic and never-ending performance with her shut-in sibling; his heartbroken, misanthropic brother, Harry; and finally his twin sister, Grace, a brash, young nurse-in-training mired in romantic drama at a Manhattan psychiatric hospital.
Witty, moving, and delightfully off-kilter, bestselling author Patrick deWitt’s sixth novel is a brilliant and raucous exploration of family, country, division, and war, from an elegant humorist who never shies from the stranger aspects of human behavior.
The Golden Boy by Patricia Finn
After an involuntary retirement from his high-flying Hollywood career, Stafford Hopkins has retreated to a luxury estate on Maui, along with his wife Agnes, both grimly resigned to life in a paradise where neither feels fully at home. Stafford is ready to retreat into himself, too, when a letter arrives with shocking news.
Stafford has been named guardian of four children he didn’t know: the grandchildren of his late childhood friend, Bobby Shepherd, whose ghost Stafford can no longer ignore. Returning to both the hardscrabble farming town and the dark secret he’d tried to forget for decades, Stafford is forced to confront his past in order to rebuild his future, and to redirect the fates of his family and the four young people suddenly in his care.
Slyly funny and deeply moving, The Golden Boy is a captivating debut about love, mercy, and second chances.
Eliza Sunshine by Michelle Good
When Eliza comes home from her first year at residential school, she is barely recognizable to her Nohkum, Swan. Once bright-eyed and curious, Eliza is now stick-thin and silent, with roughly shorn hair and dull, listless eyes. Gathering bag in hand, Swan gently leads Eliza on long walks through untouched prairie grasses, harvesting medicines, certain that the power of the land will heal her. And as they walk, she shares stories of her own suffering when her traditional ways of being and living collided with the greed and violence of encroaching settlers. For Eliza, Swan’s journey offers a master class on how to face unspeakable adversity and remain true to herself.
Decades later, Eliza and her daughter are at a crossroads. When Ella comes home from her first year at university wearing bell bottoms, braids and a beaded headband, Eliza is horrified. Eliza fought her whole life to be free of the oppression that comes with being Cree and she can’t fathom why her daughter would choose to proclaim her heritage so proudly, disregarding the consequences. With a steaming mug of tea in hand, Eliza follows in her grandmother’s footsteps, sharing with Ella the story of the adversities she faced in her own relentless pursuit of freedom.
But Ella’s idea of freedom isn’t the same as Eliza’s. And when tragedy strikes, Ella must decide how to build her life in the aftermath, navigating how best to keep the stories of her family alive when the world around her seems to want them buried along with the legions of the missing and the dead.
The Small Ones by Nazanine Hozar
In this tightly structured fable, three boys, Clay, Amir and Mehdi, and a girl, Layla, are caught up in a militia-led insurgence along the Iran-Iraq border in the early 1980s and forced to become child soldiers and martyrs. They create a little family of their own even as they yearn to escape and return to their lost homes and some kind of safety.
The Small Ones is at heart about fathers and sons—in particular, unreliable father-figures in the repressive Iran of Hozar’s telling, powerful men whose personal quest for power leads to pain and bloodshed in the larger world. It is also a tale about surviving such wars, although not without sacrifice. The story centers on two of the boys, the narrator Amir and his best friend Clay, who is both a human boy and a seemingly mythic being of transcendent power. With Amir as our guide, we trace a full-circle journey, following the river Karun along the border, where one boy eventually finds escape and freedom but only at a terrible cost to the other.
An extraordinary anti-war, anti-violence novel that takes us unflinchingly into the heart of deadly conflict through the eyes of its youngest participants, The Small Ones is a searing look at the repetitive cycles of coercion, bloodshed and war, and the cost of escaping them for a better life.
To see the full list of nominees, visit the Giller Prize website. Watch this space for the shortlist announcement on October 5th.
