Lynn Coady wins the Giller Prize for short-fiction collection

In the year of Alice Munro, all things are possible — even someone else’s short fiction winning the 2013 Scotiabank Giller Prize that the Nobel laureate has won twice.

In a surprise victory—every short-fiction collection win not by Munro is a surprise—Lynn Coady took the $50,000 award on Tuesday night for Hellgoing. The author was amusing and touching in her thanks — "I don’t like to cry, even in private" — and more expansive than most previous winners in her thanks for her publisher.

Hellgoing’s triumph was, in fact,  as much a victory for House of Anansi — the independent publisher’s first in 13 Giller nominations — as it was for Coady, a veteran writer previously shortlisted for the Governor General’s award and for the Giller (for her novel The Antagonist).

The short story’s moment of glory may not be over yet. Coady, like fellow nominee Lisa Moore, is also up for the $25,000 Rogers/Writer’s Trust award later this month.

Related links:

• Giller Prize winner Lynn Coady on the ’the weirdness’ of the writing life
• An excerpt from Hellgoing by Lynn Coady