DAPHNIS AND CHLOE longlisted for the Giller Prize!
Biblioasis is thrilled to share that Colin McAdam’s Daphnis and Chloe has been longlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize! The longlist of fourteen works was selected for the first time by a jury panel of independent booksellers, and was announced this morning on September 8. View the full list here.
In a statement, Biblioasis publisher Dan Wells writes,
All of us here at Biblioasis are thrilled that Colin McAdam’s Daphnis and Chloe has been nominated for the Giller Prize. Our thanks to the jurors—independent booksellers, naturally—and to the Giller itself for recognizing the strengths of Colin’s book. Daphnis and Chloe is a book quite unlike anything else in Colin’s ouevre, and from anything else we’ve published here at Biblioasis, a hopeful book about the power of love and beauty and storytelling to create a light in the darkness, and it has as broad an appeal as anything we’ve published. We’re grateful that this nomination will help bring Colin’s gem to a wider readership.
The Giller Prize is awarded annually to a Canadian novel or short story collection published that year. The winner receives $100,000 and the shortlisted authors each receive $10,000. The 2026 shortlist will be announced on Monday, October 5, and the winner will be announced at an award ceremony on Monday, November 16 in Toronto.
Pick up your copy of Daphnis and Chloe here.
And don’t miss our Limited Edition of the book here!
Longlisted for the 2026 Giller Prize • A 2026 CIBA Booksellers’ List Selection • One of Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2026
A fable about love and innocence and beauty, and finding a light through the darkness.
There’s a city on an island in the Pacific that can only be reached by ferry, a city where a mechanic named Frank opens a garage with his old friend Charlie. Both men marry the women they love but are unable to have children. There are drugs on the streets of this city that take away pain for strings of minutes and bring synthetic rapture; and by these streets the couples are given two babies, abandoned under strange circumstances. The boy they name Daphnis, and the girl Chloe.
And so begins a book unlike anything else, a modern retelling of an ancient story. Part Ovid and part True Romance, and narrated by Eros himself, Daphnis and Chloe offers a pulpy meditation on love and beauty, on people triumphing over darkness by wrestling deep within it, on the solace of art, and on the simple but profound pleasure provided to a blind old man as he holds his wife’s hand and listens to an increasingly familiar story.
Colin McAdam is an internationally acclaimed novelist with a PhD from Cambridge on translations of Ancient Greek—the original language of Daphnis and Chloe. He has written non-fiction for Harpers, Granta, Salon, and Hazlitt, among other journals, and his novels have won or been shortlisted for several prizes including the Amazon Best First Novel Award, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Governor General’s Award, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Prize, and the Giller Prize. He lives in Quebec.
