Elana Rabinovitch the Executive Director of Giller Prize stands on stage during the awards ceremony in Toronto, Nov. 18, 2024.Chris Young/The Canadian Press
The Giller Prize was the country’s best-known and arguably most prestigious book prize – $100,000 for the winner, a powerful driver of sales and, as literary events go, the hottest ticket in town.
For its 2023 edition, the Giller had planned a special gala marking 30 years of the prize. Ahead of the ceremony, past winner David Bergen told me that the Giller was “a great thing for books in Canada.” Another past winner, Omar El Akkad, said “I’m not 100 per cent sure that I would have a career as a writer today if it weren’t for the Gillers. It saved my career.”
The overwhelming sense, in CanLit circles, was that the Giller Prize was a wonderful thing: good for Canadian publishing and a dream achievement for a fiction writer.
But during the November, 2023, event, live on TV, everything changed – not just for that night, but for the prize.
“Scotiabank funds genocide” read signs held by protesters who interrupted the ceremony, freaking out host Rick Mercer and many guests.
It was the Scotiabank Giller Prize then, and would be the last ceremony where it would hold that title. At issue: A Scotiabank subsidiary was a large holder of shares of Elbit Systems, an Israeli arms manufacturer.
Protesters didn’t just go after the bank. They went hard after the fiction prize, which was founded in 1994 by the late philanthropist Jack Rabinovitch and whose daughter, Elana Rabinovitch, is its executive director.
The prize, for years so beloved, became toxic to a segment of the literary community, including some past winners; the two mentioned above were among its most vociferous critics. The Giller faced demand letters that it shed sponsors, jurors withdrew, some authors refused to submit their books.
To hear the venom with which some people spoke (or posted, perhaps using a device made with Israeli technology) of the prize, you’d think the Giller people were dropping the bombs themselves.
Giller Prize books $4-million donation from the Hilary and Galen Weston Foundation
Rather than continuing a funding partnership that was massively beneficial to CanLit but had become a lightning rod for protest, Scotiabank’s name was removed from the prize. Then the sponsorship ended.
For the Giller, finding a replacement funder while being targeted – during a tough environment for arts funding – was a challenge. The threat was existential. Last summer, the Giller Foundation said without help from the federal government, the prize would fold by the end of 2025.
This week, a lifeline was announced. The prize has been rescued by the Hilary and Galen Weston Family Foundation, which has given $4-million to not just ensure the Giller will live, but that it can expand its year-round programming, promoting its shortlisted authors – and CanLit writ large.
The development came four months after the group CanLit Responds announced its boycott of the Giller was over, now that the prize no longer had ties to Scotiabank or another funder it deemed problematic, and learned that the bookstore chain Indigo, which the group also has a problem with, was a promotional partner rather than a monetary sponsor.
This should mark the end of this tumultuous chapter. But will it? Or will the prize once again be targeted because, I don’t know, Weston-owned supermarkets sell kosher food manufactured in Israel?
There was positive reaction to the Weston funding announcement from Canada’s literary community, but it was somewhat muted, considering what a big deal it should be that this important literary award has been saved. And it didn’t take much digging to find griping on social media about the new donor.
Happy endings aren’t always the case in serious literature, but this is one we should be rooting for. This award has been a huge boon to Canadian fiction. The Giller Effect – the impact on sales – is a bona fide industry phenomenon. According to BookNet Canada, in 2022, the year before the controversy erupted, Suzette Mayr’s The Sleeping Car Porter saw a 927 per cent increase in sales after winning. In 2019, Ian Williams’ winning Reproduction saw a 2,846 per cent increase in sales. (Interestingly, the lowest documented increase in sales for a winner in recent years came in 2024, at the height of the controversy, when Held by Anne Michaels saw a 240 per cent increase in sales.)
The Giller celebrates Canadian fiction – and sells Canadian books. The Westons have infused it with cash. Can they afford it? Of course. Is it a tax write-off? Sure. Are groceries too expensive? You bet. Will the Westons be feted for this? Yeah. But that doesn’t mean they had to do it.
This is wonderful news, end of story. It should be a reason to celebrate and focus on the books again. The longlist comes out Sept. 8.