Executive Director of Giller Prize Elana Rabinovitch stands on stage during the awards ceremony in 2024. The Hilary and Galen Weston Foundation has donated a gift of $4-million to the literary award.Chris Young/The Canadian Press
One year ago, Canada’s richest literary award was in dire straits. The $100,000 Giller Prize, awarded annually to the best Canadian work of fiction, had appealed to the federal government for funding, saying it was in “urgent need of financial assistance.”
The government money did not materialize, but the Hilary and Galen Weston Foundation has stepped up with a multiyear gift of $4-million in total, which the Giller Prize says will fund an expansion of its year-round programming.
The gift was made in honour of the late Hilary Weston, the Irish-Canadian businesswoman, philanthropist and writer who served as lieutenant-governor of Ontario. She died Aug. 2, 2025, at 83. Her husband, W. Galen Weston, died in 2021.
“As both an author and a champion of the literary arts, our mother understood the power of storytelling to expand our thinking and help us make sense of the world around us,” Alannah Weston said in a statement.
Seven charts that show the state of arts funding across Canada
The substantial donation comes at a time when private cultural sponsorships are becoming tougher and tougher to come by.
“I think that all arts organizations, especially small ones like ours, are facing funding challenges,” Giller executive director Elana Rabinovitch said in an e-mail to The Globe and Mail last year. “We have worked diligently to find corporate, philanthropic and individual donors to support our programs and continue to do so.”
The Hilary and Galen Weston Foundation already supports the Writers’ Trust of Canada, which administers several Canadian literary awards, among them the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson won the award last year for Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead, a meditation on water through Indigenous storytelling.
The Giller Prize was founded in 1994 by philanthropist Jack Rabinovitch in honour of his late wife, Doris Giller. Mr. Rabinovitch died in 2017. The prize’s decades-long partnership with title sponsor Scotiabank ended last year.
In 2023, protesters stormed the stage at the annual Giller Prize gala with signs that read “Scotiabank Funds Genocide.” Scotiabank subsidiary 1832 Asset Management was at that point the biggest international investor in Elbit Systems Ltd., an Israeli arms company.
A year later, a number of authors pulled their books from consideration for the prize in protest of the bank’s sponsorship. As well, Ethiopian-American novelist Dinaw Mengestu left the Giller jury over the partnership
The Giller Foundation recently established the Giller Prize Writers’ Circle, an advisory panel established to “help shape the Foundation’s approach to supporting the Canadian writing community in ways that are inclusive, impactful, respectful and meaningful,” according to its website.
The members of the group are authors Eric Dupont, Charlotte Gray, Ann-Marie MacDonald, William Ping, Kai Thomas and The Globe and Mail’s Tanya Talaga.
Recent Giller recipients include Souvankham Thammavongsa, Anne Michaels, Sarah Bernstein, Suzette Mayr and Omar El Akkad. This year’s winner will be announced at a Toronto gala on Nov. 16.