Money really does talk. The Scotiabank Giller Prize is Canada’s biggest literary prize, not just because of its $100,000 purse to the single winner yearly, along with $10,000 to each shortlisted author, but because of the glit and glam throughout the season, culminating in the prize’s Oscar-style ceremony every November. The jury is usually a cast of writers’ peers, and to have one’s book chosen by them is no small boost to one’s career.
To pull off such a feat, a prize-giving organization almost always has to have sponsorship from at least one big corporation. When the Giller was just the Giller the purse was smaller, even if it was the largest amongst Canada’s literary prizes. From its inception it became, also, the most prestigious.
But here’s the cliche: big isn’t ever satisfied. It always wants to be bigger. The prize, begun at $25,000, jumped from an impressive $50,000 in a single leap to the present $100,000 — but only when the Giller hooked up with Scotiabank to become not the Giller Scotiabank Prize, but the Scotiabank Giller Prize.
The recognition one gains in winning a prize is invaluable, and the money, particularly a sum as large as the Scotiabank Giller’s, can be life changing for many authors. Ours isn’t the kind of work you do if you’re hoping to become rich. Creative writing is always tough, but even more so in these financially precarious times. My own award money has allowed me to continue to write without wondering how I will pay for essentials like groceries, car repairs, pet food and the like. And a bit of extra money has kept me sane and human, affording me a nice piece of new clothing, a little trip into the big city, a festive dinner out. For the writer, prizes are a kind of necessity — and yet we all should know and care about where this prize money comes from.
Temporary cease-fire in Gaza and hostage release now expected to start Friday 6 hours ago5:13
The problem with linking up with big corporations is that there isn’t always transparency about what these corporations invest in, or with whom they are in bed. Unless, of course, their assets and investments are made public in protests like the one that the brave young people carried out at Scotiabank Giller’s ceremony on Tuesday Nov. 13.
Remember the calls for arts organizations to let go of sponsorships by Imperial Tobacco Canada Limited’s Du Maurier Cigarettes? Those calls are similarly relevant to the current, increasingly urgent crisis we are in. We know that Scotiabank is deeply complicit with the Israeli arms manufacturer, and thanks to the protesters’ expose, we cannot look away. Elbit Systems provides Israel’s war machine the means to carry out, in Gaza, a program of ethnic cleansing, a term accepted by multiple international organizations. By extension, then, the Giller Prize is in bed with a corporation that is funding Israel’s war against Palestinian civilians. Is this something writers are, or should be, OK with?
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The fact is, the Giller has enough of a reputation that even with a smaller prize amount it would still be the one that almost every author wants to be nominated for, let alone win. Even more so, if the Giller were to pull away from Scotiabank, this would be a truly meaningful win — for writers, for Canada, for all the arts, and most of all, for our humanity. The award would be a cleaner prize, which would say a great deal about the Giller as a literary organization, one that stood up for what is right by disassociating itself from such a partnership. Of course, Scotiabank could also divest itself of its investments in Elbit Systems, and in so doing, continue to be one of Canada’s biggest corporate cultural sponsors, with the new and certain-to-be lauded badge of having chosen decency-over-profit.
More than 1,800 writers, including that night’s ultimate winner Sarah Bernstein, and several former Giller winners, have since signed an open letter calling for the charges against the protesters to be dropped.
Chris Young / THE CANADIAN PRESS This is down to writers, too. On one hand, the protesters at the prize ceremony on Tuesday the 13th were booed by many in the audience and three have subsequently been charged. On the other, more than 1,800 writers, including that night’s ultimate winner Sarah Bernstein, and several former Giller winners, have since signed an open letter calling for the charges against the protesters to be dropped. This flash protest, it must be stressed, in the long run did us a vital service.
Among the questions we must, therefore, ask ourselves: are we writers prepared to accept a smaller prize so that we are not also complicit, by association, with arms manufacturing? Are we prepared to do the dirty work of calling into question the source of monies in literary prize culture?
I would wager that were the Giller to say to Scotia “thanks, but no thanks,” the prize would gain yet another angle of prestige. The Giller would have to rein itself in, of course, and go back to being about books rather than affirming the hollow glamour of glitzy ceremonies built on top of dead bodies.
Unless, as I say, Scotiabank itself steps up and does the right thing.
Attention must also be paid to the climate of the times, where the voices of artists who are urgently denouncing the atrocities of war are being censored today — increasingly censored by our own arts organizations, a situation that is becoming much too common, and frighteningly so.
And from this point of view, Scotiabank and the Giller Prize must align with the literary communities of Canada it serves and supports and push to have any and all charges against the recent ceremony’s protesters dropped.
Shani Mootoo is a Canadian novelist and poet, has twice been shortlisted, and twice longlisted, for the Scotiabank Giller Prize.