Anne Fleming (right) holds her Giller nominated book Curiosities while chatting with local author Shelley Wood at a recent UBCO Creative Writing Gala.
UBC Okanagan’s Professor of Creative Writing Anne Fleming is one of a dozen Canadian writers who have made the longlist for the 2024 Giller Prize.
Fleming’s book Curiosities is a fictional account of a historian who finds an obscure memoir and then digs deep into the stories hidden between the pages of the people portrayed in the words penned centuries earlier.
“I was drawn to write about 17th-century England because its beliefs and practices and people are so deliciously weird. They were wrong about so many things, sometimes charmingly, sometimes disastrously,” says Fleming. “But people are people in any age. They love and fear, escape and return, suffer and endure, accuse and forgive.”
Fleming, who began teaching creative writing at UBCO in the fall of 2005, has published six books of fiction and poetry. Her writing has won significant recognition and she has previously been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award, the Journey Prize, the Danuta Gleed Award, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and Italy’s Premio Strega children’s prize.
The 12 titles chosen for the longlist were selected from more than 100 books that were submitted by publishers across Canada.
The Giller Prize, established in 1994, seeks out the best novel, graphic novel or short story collection published in English written by a Canadian author. The top prize is $100,000, while each runner up will be awarded $10,000. Previous winners include authors such as Margaret Atwood, Mordecai Richler, Michael Ondaatje, Esi Edugyan, Suzette Mayr and Lynn Coady.
Dr. Bryce Traister, Dean of the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies, says Fleming’s nomination is well deserved and her colleagues are extremely proud of her.
“With the longlist nod from the Giller Prize committee, more of the world is aware of what we in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies have long had the privilege of knowing. Anne Fleming is a rare talent, her work an inviting mix of clear observation, relentless curiosity and deft rendering,” he adds. “Neither her students nor her colleagues here at UBC’s Okanagan campus are a bit surprised with the news—and we are all delighted for her.”
Dr. Traister also notes this is the second year in a row a UBCO creative writing instructor has been longlisted for the Giller Prize. Associate Professor Kevin Chong’s novel The Double Life of Benson Yu was longlisted and also made the final five finalists for the Giller in 2023. Chong is also one of five judges for this year’s award and a shortlist will be announced on October 9.
