Annal:2002 Giller Prize for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Giller Prize in the year 2002. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
The Polished Hoe: A Novel
- 2002 Giller Prize winner
- Score: 10.52
When Mary-Mathilda, one of the most respected women on the colonized island of Bimshire (also known as Barbados), calls the police to confess to a crime, the result is a shattering all-night vigil. She claims the crime is against Mr. Belfeels, the powerful manager of the sugar plantation that dominates the villagers’ lives and for whom she has worked for more than thirty years as a field laborer, kitchen help, and maid. She was also Mr. Belfeels’s mistress, kept in good financial status in the Great House of the plantation, and the mother of his only son,…
- 2002 Giller Prize shortlist
- Score: 6.52
Mount Appetite presents 12 vibrant, intensely human tales of desire and alienation.
“Everyone at the top of Mt. Appetite is as close as they can get to heaven. It’s work to get there and agony to be denied.” Whether a salmon researcher, professional taster, illiterate faith healer, or Malcolm Lowry’s illegitimate son, the protagonists in these sly and witty stories have all climbed the mountain, and all share a restless, relentless longing that they struggle to satiate through alcohol, drugs, sex, or schemes of the heart.
Bill Gaston, author of the…
The Navigator of New York: A Novel
- 2002 Giller Prize shortlist
- 2002 Governor General's finalists
- Score: 12.52
The Navigator of New York is set against the background of the tumultuous rivalry between Lieutenant Peary and Dr. Cook to get to the North Pole at the beginning of the 20th century. It is also the story of a young man’s quest for his origins, from St. John’s, Newfoundland, to the bustling streets of New York, and the remotest regions of the Arctic.
Devlin Stead’s father, an Arctic explorer, stops returning home at the end of his voyages and announces he is moving to New York, as “New York is to explorers what Paris is to artists”; eventually he is…
Unless: A Novel
- 2003 Orange shortlist
- 2002 Booker shortlist
- 2002 Giller Prize shortlist
- 2002 Governor General's finalists
- 2002 JT Black-Fiction shortlist
- Score: 30.53
For all of her life, 44 year old Reta Winters has enjoyed the useful monotony of happiness: a loving family, good friends, growing success as a writer of light ‘summertime’ fiction. But this placid existence is cracked wide open when her beloved eldest daughter, Norah, drops out to sit on a gritty street corner, silent but for the sign around her neck that reads ‘GOODNESS.’ Reta’s search for what drove her daughter to such a desperate statement turns into an unflinching and surprisingly funny meditation on where we find meaning and hope.
Warmth, passion and wisdom come together in Shields’ remarkably supple prose. Unless, a harrowing but ultimately consoling story of one family’s anguish and healing, proves her mastery of extraordinary fictions about ordinary life.
- 2002 Giller Prize shortlist
- Score: 6.52
The only certainty in life, according to these stories, comes from the accumulation of moments that refuse to be contained.
The stories in Open cover these moments, familiar territory in the hands of most writers, in unfamiliar ways. The interconnectedness of a bus ride in Nepal and a wedding on the shore of Quidi Vidi Lake; the tension between a husband and wife when their infant cries before dawn (who will go to him?) and the husband’s wrenching memory of an early love affair; two friends, one who suffers early in life and the other midway…
