Andrew Pyper wrote more than a dozen books over his career including The Demonologist, which won the International Thriller Writers Award for Best Hardcover Novel.Courtesy of family
A new literary prize named after the late thriller and horror author Andrew Pyper will honour other Canadian writers in similar genres. The award, to be announced on Sept. 8, dovetails with the release of Pyper’s final novel, the techno-thriller Driven.
Pyper died in January, 2025, at 56 from complications of cancer. Born in Stratford, Ont., he studied English literature at McGill University and earned a law degree from the University of Toronto. Although called to the bar in 1996, he never practised. Instead he became a writer, penning more than a dozen books throughout his career, including Lost Girls, The Killing Circle and The Demonologist, which won the International Thriller Writers Award for Best Hardcover Novel and was a #1 bestseller in Canada and Brazil.
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Earlier this year, a group of Pyper’s friends and writing colleagues started fundraising for an award in the late author’s name. Within a matter of weeks, they raised enough to fund the prize for seven years. The Andrew Pyper Prize for Genre Fiction will be administered through the Writers’ Trust of Canada. Winners will receive $20,000 and must be writing in the same genres that Pyper did: horror, thrillers and other types of speculative fiction. The prize is awarded not for a single book but for a body of work; winners must have published at least three books.
Heidi Pyper, Andrew’s wife of more than 20 years, hopes the prize will fill a gap in the writing award landscape, which has few prizes for genre-specific fiction, and fewer still for horror or thriller writing.
“I think it frustrated Andrew that his work was counted out because it was scary or thrilling,” says Heidi. “But if you don’t acknowledge and reward people for writing books that entertain and thrill and scare or titillate, it’s very hard to imagine people continuing to do it.”
Heidi says her late husband was “a generous guy” when it came to supporting his industry colleagues, especially emerging writers, and would be pleased by his community’s response in creating the award. “I think he would be very puffed up by that,” she says.
Sept. 8 also marks the release of Driven which is being published under his late career pseudonym, Mason Coile. Pyper’s long-time friend, author Craig Davidson, was tasked with stewarding that book through the editing process after his death, a task Davidson says was bittersweet.
“It’s a lousy kind of task,” says Davidson, who helped establish the prize. “I was honoured to be able to do it and that I was thought to be the person to try and uphold that end, but there’s a million things I’d rather be doing.”
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Another friend of Pyper’s, author Pasha Malla, concedes that both he and Pyper had a complicated relationship with Canadian awards culture, which often overlooks certain types of writing that might not be considered “literary.”
Malla, who helped fundraise for the prize, hopes the award in Pyper’s name will show that genre-specific writing can incorporate literary elements, such as complex narratives and depth of character, too. “Andrew was a good sentence writer. Language was important to him,” says Malla. “. . . His books aren’t just schlockey stories. There’s a sophistication to them, consideration for all kinds of facets of writing that we would consider literary.”
Malla says the award is designed to celebrate more than one genre, as Pyper’s body of work itself often eschewed categorization.
“He was just so beloved all over the country by all kinds of different readers and writers, so we want the prize to be capacious in the same way that his personality was broadly appealing and likeable.”
When he thinks about Pyper, talking about writing over late-night poker games is what Malla misses the most. He describes his friend as funny, quick to laugh and someone who rarely had a negative word to say about anyone. “There’s a positivity around this prize that feels like – I don’t know if it’s honouring Andrew’s spirit or bolstered by Andrew’s spirit. There’s some kind of confluence there that just feels really nice.”