Jury Citation

Menopausal gods, procreating droids and boys born as foxes are only a modest few of the glorious frazzled beings that populate Angélique Lalonde’s astonishing story collection. Many of the ever-present concerns of the contemporary world—ecology, capital, conservation, gender fluidity, addiction, inequality, indigenous displacement, and the eternal limits of human perspective—find in Lalonde a beguiling literary voice equal to the age, pushing not only at the boundaries of literature but at those of articulation and being. Lalonde gravitates here to the fable and the fairy tale, familiar and estranging in equal measure, to claw at the divide between our world and others—the animal, the alien—while inevitably falling back on, and forgiving, the ever-flawed human being.

—2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize Jury: Zalika Reid-Benta, Megan Gail Coles, Joshua Whitehead, Tash Aw, and Joshua Ferris