By the Chapter & Verse Team » Linden MacIntyre has won the 2009 Scotiabank Giller Prize for his novel The Bishop’s Man.

The Giller is Canada’s premier prize for fiction and comes with a $50,000 awrd for the winner.

MacIntyre's win was announced today at a black-tie dinner and award ceremony in Toronto that drew nearly 500 members of the publishing, media and arts communities. 

Of the winning book, the jury remarked:

“The Bishop’s Man centres on a sensitive topic - the sexual abuses perpetrated by Catholic priests on the innocent children in their care. Father Duncan, the first person narrator, has been his bishop's dutiful enforcer, employed to check the excesses of priests and, crucially, to suppress the evidence. But as events veer out of control, he is forced into painful self-knowledge as family, community and friendship are torn apart under the strain of suspicion, obsession and guilt. A brave novel, conceived and written with impressive delicacy and understanding.”  

The Bishop’s Man is published by Random House Canada. 

Other finalists for the Giller, who earned $5,000 each, were:

• Kim Echlin for her novel The Disappeared (Hamish Hamilton Canada)

• Annabel Lyon for her novel The Golden Mean (Random House Canada)

• Colin McAdam for his novel Fall (Hamish Hamilton Canada)

• Anne Michaels for her novel The Winter Vault (McClelland & Stewart)

The shortlist and ultimate winner was selected by a jury panel made up of  American novelist and short story writer Russell Banks, UK author and journalist Victoria Glendinning, and professor and award-winning author Alistair MacLeod. The shortlist was chosen from 96 books submitted for consideration by 39 publishing houses from every region of the country.

MacIntyre is the co-host of The Fifth Estate, CBC Television’s flagship investigative affairs program. He is the winner of nine Gemini Awards for broadcast journalism. 

MacIntyre’s most recent book, a boyhood memoir called Causeway: A Passage from Innocence won both the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction and the Evelyn Richardson Prize for Non-Fiction.