Last week, amid ongoing controversy over its primary sponsor’s links to Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems, the embattled Giller Foundation quietly dropped ‘Scotiabank’ from the title of its flagship literary award.
From here on out, the Scotiabank Giller Prize (Canada’s more prestigious and lucrative literary award) will be known simply as the Giller Prize, though the Canadian multinational banking company will remain as the main sponsor of the award.
“Ultimately, more than ever, we want to ensure the prize stays true to its purpose: to celebrate the best in Canadian fiction and to give the stage to Canada’s best storytellers,” executive director of the Giller Foundation Elena Rabinovitch said in an email to The Canadian Press. “For us, that means ensuring the focus remains solely on the prize and the art itself.”
Unsurprisingly, this move (made the same week as the Giller Prize announced its 2024 longlist) has been seen by many as a cynical PR stunt, one designed to improve optics without responding to the substantive grievances of the hundreds of Canadian authors who have spent the better part of a year calling on the foundation to cut ties with Scotiabank.
For the uninitiated, here’s a quick timeline of the controversy that has dogged the Giller Prize since November, 2023:
On November 13, 2023, the Giller Prize ceremony in Toronto was interrupted by pro-Palestinian protestors. That disruption led to multiple arrests and criminal charges, and several Giller Prize organizers were subsequently accused of personally “[berating] police into charging the protesters.”
In the weeks following those arrests, over 2,000 signatories from the literary world spoke out as “Canlit Responds” in solidarity with those protestors.
In early 2024, several authors—including 2023 Giller Prize winner Sarah Bernstein—withdrew from their Giller Book Club events after the prize attempted to prevent authors and attendees from speaking about Palestine or their Scotiabank ties.
On March 26, the No Arms In The Arts campaign—a multi-pronged coalition of Palestinian solidarity groups across the cultural sector, including Canlit Responds—was launched to demand that Scotiabank (which also sponsors the Hot Docs Film Festival and the Toronto Biennial of Art) divest from Elbit Systems.
On May 14, it was announced that Scotiabank’s 1832 Asset Management had quietly halved its stake in Elbit Systems, dropping from 5.1 percent to 2.5 percent. Despite that, Scotiabank remained Elbit’s largest foreign shareholder, with over $250 million invested in the company. [According to an August filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Scotiabank’s stake has shrunk even further since May. The company currently owns a roughly 1.44 per cent stake, valued at $113 million, which makes for a total divestment over the previous year of more than three quarters of its total stake.]
On July 2, Elana Rabinovitch, executive director of the Giller Prize, issued a statement to the Globe and Mail saying that they are working on “a solution that will support the foundation, the prize and all authors” and asking that “people not construe our silence for endorsement of the status quo. Systems take time to dismantle.”
In the same Globe and Mail article, Ethiopian-American novelist and vice-president of PEN America Dinaw Mengestu said of the situation: “I think the damage to the reputation that is happening now is already going to be difficult to recover from, and it is growing week by week.”
On July 10, twenty Canadian authors signed an open letter to the Giller Foundation vowing to withhold their books and labor from the Scotiabank Giller Prize until it severs its ties to companies “complicit in Israel’s ongoing occupation, displacement and murder of Palestinians.” [The number of signees has since risen to forty-three, including two previous winners and thirty-four authors whose books would have been eligible for this year’s prize.]
Let’s cut to the chase:
We’re not talking about Baillie Gifford holding shares in Airbnb (which lists rental properties in the occupied West Bank). Or PEN America refusing to adequately condemn Israel for its killing of writers and journalists. Or Patrick Beverly signing for Hapoel Tel Aviv last month (we were all rooting for you, Pat).
We’re talking about Scotiabank maintaining a substantial financial investment in Elbit Systems, an arms company that manufactures 500-pound bombs designed for use in “densely populated urban warfare,” as well as drones which have been used to target civilians and aid workers. One of those aid workers was Jacob Flickinger, a 33-year-old Canadian who was killed on April 1, alongside six of his World Central Kitchen colleagues, when the IDF launched an airstrike on their clearly marked convoy using an Elbit Hermes 450 drone.
For the main sponsor of Canada’s most important literary award to be profiting from the wartime success of the largest arms manufacturer in Israel, at a time when Israel has been credibly accused of committing torture, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, is, to put it bluntly, grotesque.
Even if the the integrity of this year’s award hadn’t been compromised by July’s author boycott, the idea that any writer of conscience could cash a $100,000 check, knowing where that money came from, defies morality.
With a few extremely prominent exceptions, I don’t believe any individual writer should be publicly called out for their silence or inaction these past 11 months, but to the twelve authors longlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize (many, if not most, of whom are not terminally online and therefore may not even be aware of the above), I would say only this:
Write to Elena Rabinovitch and the Giller Foundation board. Plead with them to drop Scotiabank as their principal sponsor. Tell them you’d be happy for the prize money to revert back to $25,000 (as it was in mid-1990s when Jack Rabinovitch founded the award in honor of his late wife, literary journalist Doris Giller) or less, if needs be. Remind them that the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction comes with a (comparably) modest $15,000 purse, but is no less prestigious or impactful for its lack of corporate sponsorship. Ask them why, if Scotiabank’s investment in Elbit Systems is morally defensible, has the Giller Foundation chosen to scrub its name from their award? And why has the banking giant divested more than three quarters of its 2023 stake in a company that is surely experiencing a significant wartime surge in profits?
If those pleas fall on deaf ears, withdraw your book from consideration.
I don’t say that lightly. I know that to do so will be a tremendous professional sacrifice. I know that even being nominated for the Giller Prize can be a career game-changer at a time when it is harder than ever to make a living as a writer. I know that corporate sponsorship is, by its very nature, a dirty thing, and that none of us working in the arts can claim to be wholly untainted by it. But this really is different. This picket line, more than any other our industry has seen established over the past year, is one you really don’t want to cross.
Elbit Systems profits help fund the Giller Prize purse. Until Scotiabank fully divests from Elbit Systems, or the Giller Foundation cuts ties with Scotiabank, the award is stained with blood. It’s really that simple.
