Past Giller Prize winners Michael Ondaatje and M.G. Vassanji are once again nominated for the Canadian literary honour.

M.G. Vassanji speaks with reporters after his Giller win in 2003. A win this year for The Assassin's Song would make it a hat trick.
(CBC)

Competing for the $40,000 prize this year are:

• Elizabeth Hay for Late Nights on Air.
• Ondaatje for Divisadero.
• Daniel Poliquin for A Secret Between Us, translated by Donald Winkler.
• Vassanji for The Assassin's Song.
• Alissa York for Effigy.

The short list was chosen from a longer list of 15 books announced in September.

"It's the second year we've presented a long list," Jack Rabinovitch, the publisher who created the prize in memory of his late wife, Doris Giller, said at a news conference Tuesday.

"It's a wonderful way to let people know the tremendous depth of talent in this country that has been recognized both nationally and internationally."

Vassanji won the inaugural Giller Prize in 1994 for The Book of Secrets and triumphed again in 2003 for The In-Between World of Vikram Lall. The Toronto-based writer's new book tells the story of a boy raised to tend a medieval Sufi shrine in India who is haunted by that legacy as he gives it up for an "ordinary" life.

Ondaatje, also of Toronto, tied for the honour in 2000 with his Anil's Ghost sharing the prize with Mercy Among the Children by David Adams Richards. His new book, Divisadero, is about a family divided by an act of violence and one daughter's fascination with the world of a writer from an earlier time.

Hay, of Ottawa, was a finalist for the Giller for her 2000 book, A Student of Weather. In Late Nights on Air, she tells a sometimes comic, sometimes tragic tale about the cast of characters at a small radio station in the Canadian North.

Hay said she drew inspiration for her book from time spent as a CBC Radio journalist in Yellowknife in the 1970s.

"That's where I began to work for CBC Radio. And it was a very vivid time in my life, and I wanted to go back to that golden summer of 1975," she said.

Poliquin, a francophone from Ottawa, tells a story of a young man who joins the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry to fight in the First World War and his post-war experiences in a poor district of Ottawa. Poliquin has been a translator of works by writers such as Jack Kerouac and Mordecai Richler.

In Effigy, Toronto-based York writes about a Mormon girl fascinated with the art of taxidermy until asked to work on a family of wolves. It is her second book.

A trio of Canadian authors will pick this year's winner: past Giller winner David Bergen and Toronto writers Camilla Gibb and Lorna Goodison.

They each read 108 books before settling on their short list, but agreed they came to the table with similar ideas.

"If someone championed something, we would reassess that book," said Goodison, who was "pleasantly surprised" at how much they agreed on when they got together.

'Something we really love'

"We were doing something we really love," she said. "There was a pleasure principle involved."

Gibb said the jury made no special effort to pick well-known writers or to seek out new voices.

"We were just seeking out good books — good writing, good stories," she said.

The five shortlisted authors will be celebrated and the 2007 winner announced on Nov. 6 at the annual Giller Prize gala.

The authors are scheduled to read during the Toronto International Festival of Authors on Oct. 27.

A Guess the Giller contest open to the public is being run through 20 library systems across Canada and participating branches of Scotiabank.

With files from the Canadian Press