The $100,000 prize is the richest in Canadian literature. Mayr is a poet and novelist based in Calgary. She is the author of the novels Dr. Edith Vane and the Hares of Crawley Hall, Monoceros, Moon Honey, The Widows and Venous Hum. Monoceros won the ReLit Award, the City of Calgary WO Mitchell Book Award, and was shortlisted for the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Awards. Mayr is a past president of the Writers’ Guild of Alberta and has taught creative writing at the University of Calgary since 2003. “I want to acknowledge the importance of the bedroom porters – the men and the communities around them who are an essential part of Canadian history and who I wrote about in this book,” Mayr said in her acceptance speech. “And a final shout out to my LGBTQIA2S+ sisters, brothers and brothers, many of whom, like my main character Baxter, are still too scared to come out or can’t because it would be too dangerous to do so. I love you and this book is for you,” Mayr said to applause. Sleeping Car Porter, Mayr’s sixth novel, tells the story of Baxter, a black man in 1929 who works as a sleeping car porter on a cross-country train. He smiles and tries to be invisible to the passengers, but what he really wants is to save money and go to dental school. On one particular trip west, the train is stopped and Baxter finds a naughty postcard of two gay men. The postcard reawakens his memories and longings and puts his job in jeopardy. “It’s very important that black people become part of the fabric of this country’s history. It gets a little tiresome when the only time you talk about it is in February, because it’s Black History Month. It’s every month. It’s everywhere.” Mayr said in an interview with CBC Books. Mayr’s finalists included Montreal’s Rawi Hage for his story collection Stray Dogs, Egyptian-Canadian author Noor Naga for his novel If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English, Washington-based Kim Fu for his story collection Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century and Vancouver’s Tsering Yangzom We Lama for the novel Measure the Earth with Our Bodies. This year’s shortlist marked the first time that the finalist books were all written by Canadian BIPOC authors. From left: Noor Naga, Suzette Mayr, Kim Fu, Rawi Hage and Tsering Yangzom Lama, the finalists for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize on November 7, 2022. (Jeremy Chan/Getty Images) “I wrote it because it was a book I wanted to read and couldn’t find anywhere,” Mayr said. KTK books. “I found that a lot of the bedroom porter stories tended to focus on union organizing and the labor movement and Black rights in general — but I felt like there was a lack in terms of the queer experience. Because I couldn’t.” Don’t find this book, I’ve decided I’ll write it myself.” The 2022 five-member jury was chaired by Canadian author Casey Plett and also included Canadian authors Kaie Kellough and Waubgeshig Rice and American authors Katie Kitamura and Scott Spencer. The jury read 138 submitted books, narrowed them down to a longlist of 14 and then a shortlist of five. “As only the best historical novels do, every page in The Sleeping Car Porter feels alive and immediate — and terrifyingly contemporary,” the jury said in a statement. “The sleeping porter in this elegant, stylish novel is named RT Baxter — named George by the people he waits on, like any other black porter. Baxter’s dream of one day going to school to learn dentistry coexists with the secret life of him as a gay man, and in Mayr’s triumphant novel we follow him not only from Montreal to Calgary, but in and out of the lives of an indelibly etched cast of supporting characters and, finally, in a beautifully rendered flash.” This year’s televised gala in Toronto, co-hosted by actress Sarah Gadon and poet Rupi Kaur, featured a spoken word performance by Kaur. Mayr was presented with the $100,000 award by Elana Rabinovitch, daughter of Jack Rabinovitch, and Scotiabank executive vice president and chief marketing officer John Doig. Jack Rabinovitch established the award in honor of his late wife Doris Giller in 1994. Rabinovitch he died in 2017 at the age of 87. Previous Giller Prize winners include Omar El Akkad for What Strange Paradise, Souvankham Thammavongsa for How to pronounce Knife, That’s Eduian For Washington Black and Half-breed blues, Margaret Atwood For Alias GraceIan Williams for Reproduction and Alice Munro For Runaway. WATCHES | Broadcasting of the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize
