Quiviger, Soucy on short list for Giller Prize

This year's jury for theGiller Prize in literature has chosen to look past some of Canada's best-known writers to select a short list focusing on authors who do not have a big following.

Pascale Quiviger's The Perfect Circle, which won the Governor General's Award for fiction in French in 2004, is perhaps the most acclaimed of five books selected for the list, announced in Toronto Tuesday.

The Perfect Circle is about a woman living in Tuscany who's fallen in love with the wrong man. Itis the Montreal writer'sfirst novel and hasbeen translated in Englishby Sheila Fischman.

The other four writersvying for the prestigious prize are:

• Gatan Soucy of Montreal for The Immaculate Conception, a dark tale of arson and chance set in the city's east end in the 1920s.
• Rawi Hage of Montrealfor De Niro's Game, which follows two young men duringthe war in Lebanon.
• Vincent Lam of Toronto forBloodletting and Miraculous Cures,a collection of short stories reflectingon his experience as an emergency room physician.
• Carol Windley of Nanaimo, B.C.,for Home Schooling, a short story collection set on Vancouver Island and in the Pacific Northwest .

Thelistwas chosenby a jury that includes former governor general Adrienne Clarkson and authors Alice Munro and Michael Winter. A long list of 15 names was released Sept. 11, picked from 101 novels nominated by publishing houses across Canada.

David Adams Richards, Alan Cumyn and Douglas Coupland were among the better-known writersincluded on the long list who didn't make the final cut.

Clarkson said being a jury member has helped her catch up on her reading.

"After six years of being governor general, I did not read as much fiction as I could have I mean as I would have liked and so I really find that I've caught up now. I have kind of a view of what's happening in Canada in fiction in 2006 and that's really exciting," she told CBC Radio.

Winter said it was excitingthat the jury had ended up naming five new voices.

"When we were choosing the books, we had no sense of choosing a writer who had a reputation we just chose books that we loved," he said.

A Giller nomination is often a ticket to bestseller status for Canadian books, as the prize draws the attention of readers across the country.

The winner will be announced at a black tie event inTorontoNov. 7.

Lam said he was "somewhat amazed" to be named a finalist for his first book, but he took the honour philosophically.

"I experience, through my work, a lot of things happening seemingly very randomly, by chance ... so I try not to set too much store in what could happen or what might happen," he said.

Businessman Jack Rabinovitch created the Giller Prize in 1994 to honour his wife, literary journalist Doris Giller, who died in 1993.

The recent sponsorship by Scotiabank has boosted the prize money to $50,000 from $25,000, with $40,000 going to the winner and the rest split between the second- and third-place authors.

Winnipeg author David Bergen won the top prize last year for his novel The Time In Between.