![Calgary author Suzette Mayr won the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize for her novel The Sleeping Car Porter.](https://smartcdn.gprod.postmedia.digital/calgaryherald/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/mayr.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=288&h=216)
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Writers normally write for themselves and select matters they take pleasure in or really feel must be addressed. So when Suzette Mayr obtained Canada’s most prestigious literary prize for her newest novel, The Sleeping Automotive Porter, nobody was extra stunned than the creator herself.
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“I by no means anticipated this,” stated Mayr, the 2022 Giller Prize winner. “I used to be excited, I used to be terrified, as a result of I have been writing for nearly 30 years now and at no level in my life did I ever think about that sort of recognition. It’s an honor to be counted among the many individuals who have received this award.”
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The truth that the novel resonated with a wider viewers might have been her greatest shock.
“I should have thought I used to be writing a few fully area of interest subject that no one knew about and possibly would not care about,” she stated. “I am so, so excited that this story connects with so many individuals and that they see themselves on this guide, regardless that it is instructed from the attitude of a black, homosexual sleeping automotive porter in 1929.”
As a part of the Giller winner’s tour, Mayr was not too long ago in Mexico Metropolis, the place she dined with the Canadian ambassador, in addition to talking at a guide truthful in Guadalajara.
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Mayr, a professor on the College of Calgary, was born and raised in Calgary. She attended Western Canada Excessive Faculty earlier than transferring to the College of Calgary, College of Alberta and College of New South Wales in Australia.
She hasn’t had a lot time to dwell on her subsequent venture, though it’s brewing.
“My subsequent purpose — and I’ve large plans, however who is aware of the way it will end up — I actually wish to write a Stephen King (model) horror novel,” she stated. “However figuring out myself and the sort of writing I do, I do know that I’d wish to write a guide like The Shining, however it could appear like one thing fully completely different. Speak to me in 5 years and I am going to have the ability to let you know. And it most likely will not be a haunted home guide; it will be some outer house romance or one thing.”