Nicholas Herring’s Your Breath in Charcoal has been longlisted for the 2026 Giller Prize. Herring is a fisherman, carpenter, and author based in Murray Harbour, PEI, whose debut novel, Some Hellish, won the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.
“My wife called me early at work on the morning of the eighth of September and I was worried that something bad was happening because she almost never calls me. I was cleaning up around some three-hundred-pound windows we had just installed, cutting shims off and pushing a broom over concrete. The sun was rising and my coffee was still hot. Her first words were, “You made the longlist,” says Herring. “I was immediately overwhelmed (well, truthfully, I teared up a wee bit and then did my best to make sure none of the other carpenters could see me) — this has been the overriding sensation ever since.”
Your Breath in Charcoal is a working-class odyssey that follows Knickle, a young Islander with no friends, direction, or purpose in his life. When he makes a spur-of-the-moment decision to move to the big city of Toronto, amidst the chaos, Knickle discovers love, hope, and profound loss.
Paul Harding, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, calls Your Breath in Charcoal “a huge, brilliant, brawling, boozing, encyclopedic, raunchy, laugh-out-loud-then-cry-out-loud, uplifting, heartbreaking, supremely artful trip for the mind and the soul.”
“When I began to write what would become Your Breath in Charcoal, I did so with the express purpose of trying to create something beautiful and profound, something that would change the lives of my daughter and my wife, and so, rather obviously, to have even this kind of recognition is both incredibly validating and humbling,” continues Herring. “I believe that the book is a truly singular piece of work — I was swinging for the fences with every thought, with every sentence. So much of it came from the deep places in my heart and soul. Places of love and terror and joy and bewilderment. I believe that literature, that books, are hallowed things. All of this feels very sacred to me (hopefully that doesn’t sound hyperbolic or too corny). And so, I’m hoping (as all writers do) that my novel will be allowed some bit of life out in the world thanks to the Giller Jury’s very touching acknowledgement.”
Elana Rabinovitch, Executive Director of the Giller Prize, says that “this fourteen-title longlist speaks to the extraordinary richness and calibre of Canadian fiction published this year. It features a host of independent Canadian presses, debut novelists, bestsellers, and first-time nominees. The authors on this year’s longlist represent the whole of this country, with writers from Newfoundland to British Columbia and everywhere in between. Congratulations to this year’s jury for selecting such a bold, wildly original, and dynamic 2026 longlist.”
The 2026 Giller Prize shortlist will be announced on Monday, October 5, 2026.
