Twelve authors vying for this year’s Scotiabank Giller Prize will be competing for the largest purse in the literary award’s 21-year history.

At today’s longlist announcement at Montreal’s McGill University, Giller founder Jack Rabinovitch announced that, starting this year, the winner will receive $100,000, with $10,000 presented to each of the four finalists. The doubling of the prize makes the Giller the richest fiction award in Canada.

Selected from 161 titles submitted by 63 publishers, this year’s nominated books will be competing for a place on the shortlist, to be announced Oct. 6. For the first time, Toronto’s ECW Press is in the running, thanks to two debut novels, Arjun Basu’s Waiting for the Man and Jennifer LoveGrove’s Watch How We Walk.

In addition to the award gala, which takes place Nov. 10 in Toronto, Rabinovitch also announced a new series of cross-Canada events featuring the shortlisted authors. Between the Pages: An Evening with the Scotiabank Giller Prize Finalists will take place in Halifax (Oct. 20), Toronto (Nov. 3), and Vancouver (Nov. 6).

Here is the complete longlist, as selected by jurors Shauna Singh Baldwin, Justin Cartwright, and Francine Prose:

• Arjun Basu, Waiting for the Man (ECW Press)
• David Bezmogis, The Betrayers (HarperCollins Canada)
• Rivka Galchen, American Innovations (HarperCollins Canada)
• Frances Itani, Tell (HarperCollins Canada)
• Jennifer LoveGrove, Watch How We Walk (ECW)
• Sean Michaels, Us Conductors (Random House Canada)
• Shani Mootoo, Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab (Doubleday Canada)
• Heather O’Neill, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night (HarperCollins Canada)
• Kathy Page, Paradise and Elsewhere (John Metcalf Books/Biblioasis)
• Claire Holden Rothman, My October (Penguin Canada)
• Miriam Toews, All My Puny Sorrows (Knopf Canada)
• Padma Viswanathan, The Ever After of Ashwin Rao (Random House Canada)