Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Did you Guess the Giller?

Last week they announced the winner of the Giller Prize so I am too late to enter the Guess the Giller Contest.

Those of us who are readers might have loved to have a paid trip to a Literary Festival as well as the autographed set of books on the Giller short list. Did you vote?

The Guessthegiller.ca contest ran this year in over 20 public library systems and was promoted through Scotiabank’s 950 branches across the country. A recent electronic tally of on-line votes show nearly 4,000 people have cast ballots for who they thought would emerge the winner on Nov. 6. The contest offers a grand prize of an all-expense paid trip for two to one of Canada’s pre-eminent literary festivals. The runner-up prizes are complete sets of this year’s shortlisted books autographed by the authors.

I wonder if this was promoted at our local library? They haven't yet drawn for the winner of the contest. The draw is Nov. 20th.

If you haven't read the books you might still like to see the excerpts they provided on the Guess the Giller site.

The end ranking of the listed books on the voting site is:

1. Elizabeth Hay's Late Nights on Air - The winner!

2.M. G. Vassanji's Assassin's Song

3.Michael Ondatje's Divisedero

4. Daniel Poliquin's A Secret Between Us

5. Elizabeth York's Effigy

If I have one criticism of the setup on the Guess the Giller site it is that the print in the excerpts is too hard to see. They should provide a zoom. Love the way the pages turn though just like a real book. They had this in NANOWRIMO too when I did it and it was neat to see your words as if they were published!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Hey guys! Guess the Giller is back again by popular demand. Guess the finalist you think will win the 2008 Scotiabank Giller Prize. Our choices are Joseph Boyden's Through Black Sprice, Rawi Hage's Cockroach, Marina Endicott's Food to a Fault, Mary Swan's Boys in the Trees, Anthony De Sa's Barnacle Love. Visit www.guessthegiller.ca for more details. It's exciting stuff!

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong;
And I am Marie of Romania.
Dorothy Parker, Not So Deep as a Well (1937)