Established writers Anne Michaels and CBC's Linden MacIntyre are among those competing for the $50,000 Giller Prize for fiction, organizers announced Tuesday.

Nominated for The Winter Vault and The Bishop's Man, respectively, the two Toronto-based authors were among the five finalists named by this year's three-member jury: fellow writers Alistair MacLeod, Russell Banks and Victoria Glendinning.

Michaels's long-awaited followup to her award-winning novel Fugitive Pieces (1996), The Winter Vault crosses global borders and tells a love story set against the displacement caused by the construction of Egypt's Aswan Dam and Canada's St. Lawrence Seaway.

The Bishop's Man, veteran CBC broadcaster MacIntyre's latest book, delicately broaches the sensitive topic of sexual abuse perpetrated by Catholic priests.

In an interview with CBC News, MacIntyre said he was "pretty humbled to be in the final five."

The novel follows a priest who is really idealistic about the church, until he is forced to confront its political side in the wake of sexual scandals, he said.

"The book is about this awful practice that the church indulged in for a long time — when they discovered a troubled priest and an abusive situation, instead of confronting it, they moved the priest," MacIntyre said.

Recent events, including a huge settlement in August with abuse victims and the arrest of Raymond Lahey, former bishop of Antigonish, N.S., on child-porn charges, have made the book very topical.

"The book has totally been taken over by events," MacIntyre said. "I didn’t know there was a class action suit in the archdiocese and I certainly didn’t expect this dramatic settlement that Bishop Lahey announced in August and I nearly died last week when I learned that Bishop Lahey himself has now been swept up in this."

Rounding out the short list are:

• Toronto writer and teacher Kim Echlin, nominated for her third novel, The Disappeared, about a young Canadian woman who follows her exiled Cambodian lover to his homeland as he searches for his family amid the killing fields.
• New Westminster, B.C.-based short story author Annabel Lyon, for her novel debut The Golden Mean, which shines a light on history in its exploration of the story of Aristotle and his one-time pupil, Alexander the Great.
• Montrealer Colin McAdam, nominated for his second novel, Fall, a boarding school tale about two roommates — one outgoing and popular, the other a loner — enamoured of a beautiful schoolmate who then, mysteriously, disappears.

McAdam, who won the First Novel Award for his first book, Some Great Thing, has been hailed for his unique voice.

"What I like about writing, especially making a tenuous living at it, is being on my own," he told CBC News. "I think if you're going to contribute something, you try to contribute something unique."

McAdam said he started Fall as an exploration of "international relations between Canada and the U.S. and why people don't get to know one another."

The fictional boarding school where he set the novel is a device for setting these characters who never really engage with the world as a whole, he said.

"I wanted to create an honest portrayal of adolescence — more concerned with the self, less intellectual certainty," McAdam said, adding that most writing about teens seems too aware and certain.

McAdam has been writing full-time for five years, since the release of his first novel, and said he's very happy about the Giller nomination.

CanLit maven Margaret Atwood, longlisted for her most recent post-apocalyptic tale The Year of the Flood, had been considered a front-runner but failed to make the cut.

Established by Toronto businessman Jack Rabinovitch to honour the memory of his wife, the literary journalist Doris Giller, the annual prize is one of Canada's most prestigious and lucrative literary awards. It celebrates the best Canadian novel or book of short fiction published in the past year.

The 2009 winner will be announced at a gala in Toronto on Nov. 10. Along with the cash prize for the winner, each finalist receives $5,000.